Barb's Burblings

History geekdom

Last night I went to Politics & Prose to see David Hackett Fischer, the author of Paul Revere's Ride, probably my favorite of all the books I had to read in my history classes in college (his writing style is fantastic). He was promoting his new book, Liberty and Freedom, so that's what he talked about mostly. It was really interesting. As you can imagine, a lot of people asked him about Bush's inagural address (in which freedom trounced liberty, 27-15) and various current political issues. I wanted to ask him about one of my favorite lines from PRR; he said that when he wrote the book, the only thing less popular than writing about dead white guys was writing about "a dead white guy on a horse." Anyway, I wanted his reaction about the popularity of exactly those books over the past few years. But I didn't get a chance.

I did get his autograph, though. And man, was I a dork. I only gushed a little, but was like, "He is SO COOL!" Which is probably not something most people think about middle-aged history professors.

But he IS cool.