Autobiography

 

Born in Port Chester, near New York City, I grew up in South Bend, Indiana. After high school, I traveled in Europe and Latin America, living in bohemian fashion among locals and other foreigners, learning French and Spanish, sometimes hitchhiking as I had for years back home in the USA. French Canadian friends invited me to Montreal in 1979, and I stayed on to do my B.A. in philosophy at the Université de Montréal.

 

After a brief interest in Soviet politics and foreign policy, I discovered and fell in love with history. To me there is really nothing like trying to figure out, say, how the government of the tsars collapsed or why the Russian masses followed Lenin in 1917. Only documents of various kinds remain, and getting them to "talk" all while striving to interpret properly what they "say" is the tricky, fascinating work of the historian. This work is important because we cannot understand the present world and how we got to this point without a sense of where we have come from. Anyone who thinks the past doesn’t matter is as silly as people who think their parents haven’t influenced them, that they are autonomous beings who forge their own reality without any connection to their genes and home environments.

 

I’m not saying everything is predetermined and that we have no free will. On the contrary, I mostly disagree with the Marxists and other social determinists who believe that impersonal “social forces,” “economic structures,” and other assorted nebulous phenomena like supposedly rigid “social classes” are what make history. Although I believe the development of social history, where members of the lower classes have garnered more of historians’ attention than previously, has had a positive impact on the profession, in my view ideas and individuals have always played a more important, more clearly discernable role in significant historical events and trends than groups or material forces. Scarcity of resources, natural disasters, and human conflict have beset mankind since time immemorial, yet only in some places and at some times has human genius arisen and made successful attempts to solve these problems. It is in large part in order to understand how we in our age might learn from such efforts that we must study history. Of course, it’s also just a blast.

 

In addition to history, I am fascinated by foreign cultures in general, and contemporary Russian culture in particular. My work has taken me repeatedly back to Russia and also to several Western European countries. I am a fan of early and classical music, play recorder and guitar, love to read novels, write songs and poems from time to time, walk all over Chicago as often as possible, teach Sunday school, often visit our city’s great museums, spend lots of time at the park with my little daughters, and lift weights regularly to release tension.

 

I want to say a word about my political philosophy. In an academy dominated by liberals, I am a conservative. Being a conservative to me means faith in individuals, distrust of big organizations, dislike of bureaucracy, a love of country, a respect for community, a belief in universal core values, an affection for tradition, a preference for established social norms and classic texts, and an impatience with grand social theory. Of course, I’m a liberal in the classical sense, so I respect everyone’s opinion and welcome the freest exchanges of ideas.

 

I love teaching. There is practically nothing in the world more rewarding than teaching gifted, committed, enthusiastic students. I especially appreciate students I can treat like adults. I mean students who take responsibility for their participation in class. My best experiences have been coming to class and finding everyone ready to talk about the historical questions I’m passionate about because they find them exciting too.