Volume 34, Number 14 · September 24, 1987
Gilding Lincoln's Lily
By C. Vann Woodward
Freedom
by William Safire
Doubleday, 1,125 pp., $24.95
Much as they may deplore the fact, historians have no monopoly on the past and no franchise as its privileged interpreters to the public. It may have been different once (though Aristotle thought the claims of the poets superior), but there can no longer be any doubt about the relegation of the historian to a back seat. Far surpassing works of history, as measured by the size of their public and the influence they exert, are the novel, works for the stage, the screen, and television. It is mainly from these sources that millions who never open a history book derive such conceptions, interpretations, convictions, or fantasies as they have about the past. Whatever gives shape to popular conceptions of the past is of concern to historians, and this surely includes fiction.
Review, 4841 words
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