Beyond Truman: Robert H. Ferrell and Crafting the Past

(Paperback)

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This study draws on the life of renowned historian, Robert H. Ferrell, to explore issues related to the history profession. Ferrells life story contextualizes postmodernism, the New Left, and the challenges of crafting history. The author analyzes Ferrells biases, examining distinctions between his morals and actions as well as his private and public life. This book provides crucial insight into the subjectivity of history, the boundaries of the discipline, and the effects of historians social lives on their work.

Reviews

Douglas A. Dixon provides a fine and full portrait of historian Robert H. Ferrell, among the most distinguished interpreters of American diplomacy writing during the American century. More than a study of a man or a school, this study assays the political and intellectual changes of an entire profession in the decades that followed the great postwar boom. -- David Brown, Elizabethtown College
Thanks to this study, Robert H. Ferrellarguably Indiana Universitys best-known and best-loved professor of Historynow figures into a historical narrative of his own. Douglas A. Dixons research portrays Ferrellthe scholar and the manas something more than the giant of diplomatic history or the Truman biographer, presenting him, instead, as a distinct individual, both a product and a shaper of a fascinating period in American intellectual life. -- Eric Sandweiss, Indiana University

Author Bio

Douglas A. Dixon earned his PhD at the University of Georgia.