Making history matter

As a scholar of intellectual and cultural history, Dawidoff takes the stance that historians ought to take an active role in our democratic culture, informing and participating in public discourse. He argues for a broad reach when it comes to cultural expression, resisting the polarization of formal intellectual history and folk or commercial popular culture. Divided into sections that deal with the patriarchs of American political and intellectual culture, expressive culture, and a historian's public voice, this book is a model of engaged and engaging writing--Ralph Waldo Emerson and Katharine Hepburn are treated with equal seriousness of purpose and analytic rigor. In the closing section, he traces key events in the continual struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights and takes on such unresolved issues as safer sex, needle exchange programs to control HIV transmission, and the public controversy around the portrayal of gay and lesbian television characters. --From publisher description.

History--but -- pt. 1: The night of the living dead white men. The Jeffersonian option ; Franklin and Jefferson : before "the democratic fact" ; "Tails in the air" : Henry Adams and the American history of the European Middle Ages ; Willie's and Harry's excellent adventure ; Fish out of water : George Santayana ; In my father's house are many closets -- pt. 2: Listening to Sophie Tucker. Criticism and American cultural repair ; The kind of person you have to sound like to sing "Alexander's Ragtime Band" ; Some of those days ; Fred Astaire ; Katharine Hepburn : "the heiress of all the ages" ; From Ohio to the Big Rock Candy Mountain : Los Angeles as the terminus of American democratic culture -- pt. 3: Doing something about it. Stalking the blushing zebra -- The gay nineties : opinion pieces. Gay rights. One percent or ten percent-the law isn't counting ; Clinton speaks the haters' code word ; First, we demand recognition ; Gays and lesbians need a real movement ; The feds, civil rights, and Camp Sister Spirit ; Gays won't take Clinton's betrayal lightly -- Clio in the morning papers. Clio in office? ; Seeing the messiness of America's true history ; Lott's wife -- Politics of AIDS…