Educational Philosophy

For the past twenty years since I turned from the isolated pursuit of a professional writing career to researching, writing and teaching in a collegiate setting, I have taught the full sweep of American history from the arrival of the first hunters from Central Asia to the present day. At all levels, from introductory classes for first year students to graduating senior and graduate students, in classrooms and lecture halls in New England and in Europe, I have tried to put to work my own research and that of my colleagues to reanimate the lives and times of earlier Americans, their struggles, accomplishments, foibles and failures. We are a new and vital people, the Americans, those celebrated because they were canonized by our forefathers and those already and unfortunately forgotten. It is the duty of the educator to use the inventiveness and the energy so characteristic of our new American race to place the student back in the world of our fathers and mothers, their fathers, mothers and grandparents, to recreate their experiences, what it was that made them come to America and stay through terrible hardship to make new lives and a dynamic new people. I do not seek to create or worship a pantheon of new civic gods, only to bring to life the story of how founding father and forgotten American alike conquered and transformed first their own continent and then, for better and worse, the rest of their world and ours.

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