Synopses & Reviews
For more than twenty-five years, After the Fact has provided a time-tested, innovative approach to guiding students through American history and the methods used to study it. In dramatic episodes that move chronologically through American history, this best-selling book examines a broad variety of topics like oral evidence, photographs, ecological data, films and television programs, church and town records, census data, and novels. Whether for the introductory survey or for a historical methods course, After the Fact is the ideal text for any instructor who wants to introduce his or her students to what it is that historians actually do when studying American history.
About the Author
James West Davidson received his B.A. from Haverford College and his Ph.D. from Yale University. A historian and full-time writer, he is author of The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth Century New England, Great Heart: the History of a Labrador Adventure (with John Rugge), and other books. Mark H.Lytle received his PhD from Yale University and is Professor of History and Environmental Studies as well as Chair of the American Studies Program at Bard College. He is also Director of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard. His publications include The Origins of the Iranian-American Alliance, 1941-1953, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (with James West Davidson) and, most recently, “An Environmental Approach to American Diplomatic History” in Diplomatic History. He is at work on The Uncivil War: America in the Vietnam Era.
Table of Contents
1. Serving Time in Virginia: The Perspectives of Evidence in Social History
2. The Visible and Invisible Worlds of Salem: Studying Crisis at the Community Level
3. Declaring Independence: The Strategies of Documentary Analysis
4. Jacksons Frontier, and Turners: History and Grand Theory
5. The Invisible Pioneers: Ecological Transformations along the Western Frontier
6. Quilting in the 1840s and 1850s: Exploring Material Culture
7. The Madness of John Brown: The Uses of Psychohistory
8. The View from the Bottom Rail: Oral History and the Freedpeople