Author and professor H.W. Brands explores the human condition through history
As historian H.W. Brands sees it, there are two kinds of history.
There’s the public-facing “big history” as captured by newspaper headlines and in school textbooks. And then there’s the more private “little history” of what’s going on inside the heads of major historical figures as they take actions that shape our world.
It’s this “little history” that most fascinates Brands, who – in the past four decades – has produced more than 30 books devoted to political players, economics and foreign affairs.
“When I write about individuals in history I deliberately don’t do what most historians and biographers do, which is to pass judgment on the subjects,” Brands recently told a gathering of 200 at Central Library in Tulsa.
“I’ve been in this history business for a while. The judgments people make depend less on facts than on the values individuals bring to the study.”
Brands was in Tulsa to receive the 39th annual Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, which celebrates esteemed, award-winning authors across all forms of the written word.
Past recipients have included novelists Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, poet Billy Collins, playwright Neil Simon, and historian David McCullough.
As part of the award festivities, Brands took part in a dialogue moderated by Oklahoma Rep. John Waldron.
A former high school math teach turned University of Texas at Austin history professor, Brands told Waldron he brings the same enthusiasm to his biographies of notables such as Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt as he does to the lecture hall.
“My philosophy of teaching,” he reflected, “is to generate more energy at the front of the room than the students collectively can generate in the rest of the room.”
No small feat, as Brands regularly lectures to rooms packed with 500 undergrads, all of whom – in Brands’s opinion – are predisposed to want what he as a storyteller can offer.
“History is full of stories,” he said. “And humans are wired to respond to stories. I’m not in the information business. I’m in the inspiration business. I want to inspire an interest in history. My job is to make them want to learn more.”
Early in his academic career, a younger Brands specialized in studying American foreign policy during the Cold War. As his career progressed, however, his ambitions broadened to the point where he contemplated a comprehensive American history not unlike Will Durant’s 11-volume “Story of Civilization.”
When prospective publishers balked at the scale of the project, Brands deduced he could accomplish the same effect by writing individual biographies of key figures along the U.S. timeline.
This strategy has worked, though not without a significant drawback: American history thus far has been dominated by the victories of white men, an inequity echoed in Brands’s choices of biographical subjects.
Now 71, Brands has twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist – once for his biography of Benjamin Franklin (“The First American”) and again for this look at Franklin D. Roosevelt (“Traitor to His Class”).
Unlike some biographers who come to identify closely with their subjects, Brands prefers to keep a healthy distance.
“When I write about people,” he said, “I don’t imagine myself to be them. I can’t imagine having that reaction.”
Currently at work on a biography of George Washington, Brands has found fertile soil in particularly polarizing figures.
An example is Andrew Jackson, who as president brought the United States much-needed security from foreign threats even as he engineered the profoundly devastating forced relocation of Native American tribes.
“As an educator, I do my best to make it just as plausible to hate Andrew Jackson as to love him,” Brands said.
As tempting as some historians find it to project their knowledge of the past onto possible future events, Brands works hard not to fall into that line of thinking.
“As a historian, it’s difficult enough to explain the past,” he said. “I try to assiduously avoid predicting the future. But I will explain it to you after it happens.”
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