Allan Nevins – författare

When Colonel Charles S. Wainwright (1826-1907), later a brevet brigadier general, was commissioned in the First New York Artillery Regiment of the Army of the Potomac in October 1861, he began a journal. As an officer who fought at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg, and who witnessed the leadership of Generals McClellan, Hooker, Burnside, Meade, Grant, and Sheridan, he brilliantly describes his experiences, views, and emotions. But Wainwright's entries go beyond military matters to include his political and social observations. Skillfully edited by Allan Nevins, historian and author of the classic multivolume Ordeal of the Union , this journal is Wainwright's vivid and invaluable gift to posterity.

One of the most controversial and romantic figures in American history, John C. Frémont experienced a dizzying succession of public triumphs and humiliations. He made his name exploring the West, surveying, mapping, and describing the Rockies, the Great Basin, and Oregon country. Allan Nevins gives Frémont full credit for his achievements as a topographer, soldier, and politician while noting how often his rashness attracted enemies and led to his downfall: to a court-martial for disobeying orders during the Bear Flag Rebellion, to a disastrous winter expedition in the San Juan Mountains, to his defeat as the first presidential candidate of the Republican party, to the loss of his Civil War command. Through sickness and health, poverty and wealth, his wife, the vivacious Jessie Benton Frémont, stood by him. Their enduring romance occupies much more than the background in this absorbing story of his life. The dean of American historians, Allan Nevins won the Pulitzer Prize for his biographies of Grover Cleveland and Hamilton Fish.

In this book, originally published in 1962, one of America’s most distinguished historians defines the scope and variety fo his field and out lines his views on history’s objectives both as a science and as an art. The book provides insight into historians’ methods of interpreting and presenting the past from Thucydides to twentieth century scholarship on Europe and America. It sets apart the different approaches to history – biographical, cultural, intellectual, geographical and political – illuminating the peculiar goals, problems and development of each discipline. It discusses the question of pre-history and its companion science, archaeology and spans the history of the collection and use of records.

In this book, originally published in 1962, one of America’s most distinguished historians defines the scope and variety fo his field and out lines his views on history’s objectives both as a science and as an art. The book provides insight into historians’ methods of interpreting and presenting the past from Thucydides to twentieth century scholarship on Europe and America. It sets apart the different approaches to history – biographical, cultural, intellectual, geographical and political – illuminating the peculiar goals, problems and development of each discipline. It discusses the question of pre-history and its companion science, archaeology and spans the history of the collection and use of records.

The brilliant historian of the mid-twentieth century, Allan Nevins, introduces this volume of correspondence by and to James Truslow Adams with a summary of his life and importance. This presents his appreciation of Adams in a manner that properly serves as a bridge to a full range of his correspondence, including a long series of letters by Adams himself.The correspondence is divided into a wide network of letters covering two world wars, and highlighting Adams' efforts to speak as a public historian of the age. The range covered extends from World War I, where he participated in the Paris Conference, to the New England histories, the year of the Economic Crash, the making of his great book, The Epic of America, and the final summing up, making history accessible to the larger publics.Both the biographical sketch and the correspondence reflect Adams as possessing a nimble, precise mind and a stubborn set of opinions that are sometimes liberal, while at other times conservative. Despite a lifetime of public service, Nevins and the letters remind us, Adams was and remained essentially a scholar. The same can be said of Nevins himself and that made him the perfect spokesman and student of Adams' writings. For those to whom the meshing of solid American history and public service are of interest this will be an unusual, but entirely worthwhile experience.