H. W. Brands Quotes

H. W. Brands

Profession : Historian

Birth : August 7, 1953

I've probably written some books - I know I've written some books that were more interesting to me than to a large audience, but that was mostly when I was first getting started in academia and writing for a narrow audience.

H. W. Brands

The stories that I tell, the topics that I choose to write about, usually are suggested by something that I've done before.

H. W. Brands

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

H. W. Brands

Harry Truman's decision to fire Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War in April 1951 shocked the American political system and astonished the world. Much of the world didn't realize the president had the power to fire a five-star general; much of America didn't realize Truman had the nerve.

H. W. Brands

Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.

H. W. Brands

It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs.

H. W. Brands

With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.

H. W. Brands

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?

H. W. Brands

I'm trying to tell the story of the evolution of America. Each biography is a life in time, and I can see there's a particular task for each generation that I write about.

H. W. Brands

The Tea Party loves Reagan because he said exactly what they want to hear.

H. W. Brands

I had long known the story of Aaron Burr, but when I heard about his remarkable daughter, Theodosia, about the relationship between the two and about her tragic disappearance, I knew I wanted to tell their story.

H. W. Brands

Reagan is the subject of ongoing political debate, and a lot of liberals don't want to take Reagan any more seriously than they did when he was president. I understand why they don't, but they should.

H. W. Brands

Reagan has been deified by the Republican Party, which is odd. The Reagan that modern Republicans revere is not the real Reagan.

H. W. Brands

The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was.

H. W. Brands

Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, 'The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let's get the government out of the way.' On the foreign policy side it was, 'Communism is bad, and we're going to defeat it.'

H. W. Brands

I've been writing American history for a long time, and I've had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they're hard to write about because they don't leave much of a historical trace, and they're not usually involved in high-profile public events.

H. W. Brands

Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.

H. W. Brands

If it's a good story, it's a good story, and it draws readers in.

H. W. Brands

When a president was elected with foreign policy experience, it was usually less about his foreign policy experience than other things.

H. W. Brands