“Great bounding ideas that are the building blocks of our culture today, that’s what I do,” said David Hackett Fischer. What he doesn’t say is that judges from the Pulitzer Prize committee to the Book of the Month Club selectors to Oxford University Press editors have recognized his singular gift — culling those big ideas from the sweep of the American experience and making them compelling to scholar and buff alike. On Oct. 25, Fischer will add to his many honors and awards when he receives the 2008 Ruth Ratner Miller Award for Excellence in American History, conferred by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library. Fischer’s career spans more than 40 years of scholarship and teaching at Brandeis University, where he is both university professor and the Earl Warren Professor of History. A graduate of Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University, he has also been a visiting lecturer around the world. The subjects of his books range from biography to historiography — he coined the phrase “historian’s fallacy” — and from cultural dynamics to macroeconomics. “Albion’s Seed”(1989), which outlined his theory of “folkways” or British immigrant cultural groups and their impact on the early development of American values, set out the first of Fischer’s “big ideas.” And in “Liberty and Freedom”(2005) he examined through iconography the two principle American ideals to come from that tradition. The other big ideas Fischer believes ...
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“Great bounding ideas that are the building blocks of our culture today, that’s what I do,” said David Hackett Fischer. What he doesn’t say is that judges from the Pulitzer Prize committee to the Book of the Month Club selectors to Oxford University Press editors have recognized his singular gift — culling those big ideas from the sweep of the American experience and making them compelling to scholar and buff alike. On Oct. 25, Fischer will add to his many honors and awards when he receives the 2008 Ruth Ratner Miller Award for Excellence in American History, conferred by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library. Fischer’s career spans more than 40 years of scholarship and teaching at Brandeis University, where he is both university professor and the Earl Warren Professor of History. A graduate of Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University, he has also been a visiting lecturer around the world. The subjects of his books range from biography to historiography — he coined the phrase “historian’s fallacy” — and from cultural dynamics to macroeconomics. “Albion’s Seed”(1989), which outlined his theory of “folkways” or British immigrant cultural groups and their impact on the early development of American values, set out the first of Fischer’s “big ideas.” And in “Liberty and Freedom”(2005) he examined through iconography the two principle American ideals to come from that tradition. The other big ideas Fischer believes ...