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Few contemporary academic historians have the range of Brandeis University's David Hackett Fischer. Even a cursory survey of his major books confirms this. Fischer's first book, published in 1965, was a highly-praised study of the Federalist Party.1 He followed that with Historian's Fallacies, a field-related logic of historical thought now in its 31st printing.2 From philosophy of history, Fischer turned his attention to the question of how attitudes toward aging altered during the course of American history. The result was Growing Old in America, currently in its 10th printing.3
During the 1980s, Fischer embarked on a massive new project: a multi-volume history of American "folkways." His first and only installment of this cultural history to date, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America,4 appeared in 1989 to acclaim and controversy.5 It is one of the most ambitious works of recent American historiography, a "primary synthesis"-"the creation of a general interpretation of American history from original materials."6
During the 1990s, Fischer produced three more books on diverse topics. He revisited the themes of migration and cultural filtration in Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, first published in 1993.7 One year later, Oxford University Press published his award-winning Paul Revere's Ride,8 an elegantly written narrative based on exhaustive primary research that takes that almost mythic event seriously. His next book, published in 1996, went in a very different direction; The Great Wave was a history of price revolutions.9 The sixty-five-year-old Fischer shows no signs of slowing down. Liberty and Freedom, a book about the iconography of liberty and freedom, will be published soon. And he is busy working on a sequel to Albion's Seed which investigates transmission of African folkways to America.
From this considerable and varied output, David Hackett Fischer appears to be a tremendously gifted but hopelessly restless historian who jumps from topic to topic. Gifted he is, but there is a consistency to his work that may not be immediately apparent. As the accompanying interview will reveal, Fischer is attracted to large questions that lend themselves to rigorous empirical investigation, the results of which are told in an engaging narrative style. He calls his approach a "braided narrative"-the combination of "story-telling and problem-solving."10 Moreover, he revisits a few key themes regardless of his...