James M. Banner
AUTHOR

James M. Banner

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I am a Yale graduate and received my Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, where I studied with Richard Hofstadter. My first and only full-time academic position was in the history department of Princeton University from 1966 to 1980, which I left to found the American Association for the Advancement of the Humanities. During those years, I held a Guggenheim Fellowship, was a fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard, and served as a member of the board of directors of the American Council of Learned Societies. More recently, I was Fulbright Visiting Professor of American History at Charles University, Prague. As a historian, I have of course written books and articles about the past, as well as about education and public affairs. Those books include To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789-1815 (Knopf, 1969); with James M. McPherson et al., Blacks in America: Bibliographical Essays (Doubleday: 1971); with F. Sheldon Hackney and Barton J. Bernstein, Understanding the American Experience (2 vols; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973); ed. with John R. Gillis, Becoming Historians (University of Chicago Press, 2009); ed. A Century of American Historiography (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009); and, most recently, Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History (Cambridge University Press, 2012). But having been a teacher all my life in schools and universities, starting when I served in the U.S. Army in France in the late 1950s, I have also thought hard about teaching and learning, which led to two books which I co-authored with Harold C. Cannon, a classicist. Those books are The Elements of Teaching and The Elements of Learning (Yale University Press, 1997 and 1999). I was also, with Joyce Appleby, a co-founder of the History News Service, an informal syndicate of historians who write op-ed pieces, as well as one of the moving spirits behind the founding of the National History Center, an initiative of the American Historical Association. I am now writing a book on revisionist history tentatively entitled “Battles Over the Past: Revisionist History—What It Is, Why We Have It” and hoping for a New York production of a play, “Good and Faithful Servants,” drawn from the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (June 2013)
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