Morton Keller

My Times & Life: A Historian's Progress Through a Contentious Age

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

"To be a reasonably successful member of a not notably distinguished generation," says Morton Keller in his introduction to My Times and Life "is hardly to be among the best-situated claimants for public attention or admiration." Yet this account of an ordinary life played out in extraordinary times has a wide resonance, as his story reflects the experiences of a large portion of his generation. Although that generation was born too late to be part of the great generation that fought and won World War Two, and born too early to be part of the boomer generation, it nonetheless was a generation that lived through a half century of the greatest social change our country has ever experienced. The primary source for background on his ancestry and youth, he explains as he begins his tale, turned out to be the most common record-keeping device of twentieth century American families: snapshots. Reflecting on the "photo legacy" of his family's fading snapshots collected over the years, Keller draws on the yellow, sepia-toned pictures to re-create his parents' early life as immigrants and his own childhood in Brooklyn. He describes his experience as a preadolescent confronting the drama of World War Two on the home front: too young to fight but old enough to be aware of what was happening. And he tells how leaving New York to attend the University of Rochester and later Harvard catapulted him into a world of people, ideas, and artifacts distant from anything that he had been accustomed to. Particularly poignant are his memories of being a middle-aged parent and professor at Brandeis University dealing with the baby boom generation in the 1960s and 1970s. With a legal and political historian's insight he explains how, as much as anything, popular music has distinguished modern America's sequence of generations one from the other. Bringing his story up to the present day, he ends by telling of his more sedate mode of existence in the inner-directed 1980s and 1990s, ending in a retirement representing the beginning of a new phase of his life--a fitting conclusion to an always attractive, but hardly momentous, American saga of respectable achievement from relatively humble origins. Keller remains an active scholar today. He is the author of fifteen books, his most recent titles being, Making Harvard Modern (2007), coauthored with his wife, Phyllis Keller, and America's Three Regimes: A New Political History (2009).

Produktdetails

• Hoover Institution Press Publi
• Verlag: HOOVER INST PR
• First Edition
• Seitenzahl: 164
• Erscheinungstermin: Januar 2011
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 155mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 440g
• ISBN-13: 9780817911843
• ISBN-10: 0817911847
• Artikelnr.: 31202853

Autorenporträt

Morton Keller is the Spector Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. He previously taught at the University of North Carolina and the University of Pennsylvania and has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Sussex, and Oxford, where he was the Harmsworth Professor of American History. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He has been a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution since 2005. His books include The Life Insurance Enterprise, 1885-1910 (1963); The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast (1968); Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (1977); Regulating a New Economy (1990); Regulating a New Society (1994); Making Harvard Modern (with Phyllis Keller) (2001); and America's Three Regimes (2007). Articles written by Keller have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Daedalus, the New Republic, the American Interest, the Wilson Quarterly, and many scholarly journals.