Making History Matter

by Robert Dawidoff

Overview

This collection of Robert Dawidoff's essays and journalism is peopled by the likes of the Founding Fathers, Fred Astaire, Henry and William James, Sophie Tucker, Trent Lott, and Cole Porter. Drawing together this unlikely cast of characters, Dawidoff probes into the role of outsider groups as well as intellectual and political elites in the formation of American culture.

As a scholar of intellectual and cultural history, Dawidoff takes the stance that historians ought to take an active role in our democratic culture, informing and participating in public discourse. He argues for a broad reach when it comes to cultural expression, resisting the polarization of formal intellectual history and folk or commercial popular culture. In his view and in his book, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Katherine Hepburn are equally worthy topics for a historian's consideration, providing that they are treated with equal seriousness of purpose and analytic rigor. In "The Gay Nineties" section that closes the book, he traces key events in the continual struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights and takes on such unresolved issues as safer sex, needle exchange programs to control HIV transmission, and the public controversy around the portrayal of gay and lesbian television characters.

Divided into sections that deal with the patriarchs of American political and intellectual culture, expressive culture, and a historian's public voice, this book is a model of engaged and engaging writing. Accessible and witty, Making History Matter will appeal to general and academic readers interested in American history as well as gay and lesbian political and cultural issues.

About the Author:

Robert Dawidoff is John D. and Lillian Maguire Distinguished Chair and Professor of History at Claremont Graduate University. He is most recently the author (with Michael Nava) of Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America and The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture V. Democracy in Adams, James and Santayana.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566397483
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	04/14/2000
Pages:	245
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

What People are Saying About This

Andrea Marcovicci

I would treasure this book for its brilliant essays on music and the lessons against intolerance alone, but there is such wisdom to glean from its pages that I will be reading it again and again for years to come.
— (Andrea Marcovicci, Singer/Actress)

Stanley Cavell

Admirers of Robert Dawidoff's work know the elegance and revelation in his readings of the fate of high intellect in our democracy. In his new book, that fate is shown to be enacted through a perpetually astonishing range of encounters of the ordinary with the extraordinary, the low-down with the high-hat, each inviting and liberating the other's responsiveness. Like good philosophy, this work lets you know what you thought you did not know and shows you how to treasure what your thought you need not know.
— (Stanley Cavell, Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, Harvard University)

Marjorie Perloff

I know of no book more aptly titled than Making History Matter. In these exhilarating essays, Robert Dawidoff manages to make history come wholly alive and he is equally at home with Sophie Tucker and Fred Astaire as with Jefferson, Santayana, and the brothers Henry and William James. Whether writing about the role of needle exchanges in the dissemination of AIDS, or spoofing some of the deficiencies of academic Cultural Studies, Dawidoff is consistently sprightly, engaging, witty, and brilliant. For Dawidoff, the personal really is the political and vice-versa, and yet his book is never doctrinaire or polemic. Reading Making History Matter is pure pleasure—and truly edifying as well.
— (Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, and author of Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary)