Reckoning with History

Reckoning with History brings together original essays from a diverse group of historians who consider how writing about the past can engage with the urgent issues of the present. Covering a broad range of topics, these essays illuminate what it means to be a socially and politically engaged historian.

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman–National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. He is also the editor of the journal Civil War History.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar is the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. She serves as the national director of the Association of Black Women Historians.

T.K. Hunter (1956–2018) was a historian of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world who taught a wide variety of courses at Western Connecticut State University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Montclair State University, Horace Mann School, Manhattan College, Brooklyn College, the New School, and City College of New York.

Timothy Patrick McCarthy holds a joint faculty appointment at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is also the Stanley Paterson Professor of American History in the Boston Clemente Course in the Humanities.

Adrienne Petty, author of Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War:
Reckoning with History is a celebration and testament to how one’s changing social and political commitments can—and indeed must—inform one’s historical work, as modeled by Eric Foner. The editors have put together a timely and insightful group of essays about why history matters and why engaging with the public should matter to historians.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America:
I love these essays. They are among the best ever written about the craft of history writing, the indispensability of creating and using archives, as well as the power of hindsight and new perspective to reconsider the meaning of the past. This brilliant anthology is perfect for this moment, just when we need to understand more than ever how American history becomes part of the public narrative of who we are.

Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy:
To recover a long-buried past in the archives is to experience the most extraordinary joy. But, as Reckoning with History shows so beautifully, doing true justice to the past is at the real heart of what it means to be a historian. This moving volume reminds us all why the writing of history matters so very much to the world we live in and to the one we hope yet to make.