Happy Birthday, George Bancroft

George Bancroft, the father of American history, born this day in 1800.

I'm a sucker for the 19th century American historians--Bancroft, Henry Adams, and Fredrick Jackson Turner in particular. Why I like reading them is to get a sense of how people at the time viewed their own history as an active enterprise that they were creating. Distortions and biases? Absolutely, but viewing theirs helps me see the distortions and biases in our own attempts to write history in the present.

Oh, and if anyone (I don't know, say a moonbat geneticist) ever gives you the whole "waa, history is only written by the victors" line, find the nice thick Landmark Edition of Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War edited and translated by Robert Strassler with an introduction by Victor Davis Hansen and shove it down their throat, politely pointing out the first great work of history was written by a defeated Athenian general.