David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American (New York: Random House, 2010), 624 pp., $30.00.
Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 496 pp., $30.00.
Robert V. Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise that Saved the Union (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 200 pp., $24.00.
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 800 pp., $35.00.
IF GREAT historians wake the dead, mediocre ones put the living to sleep. No one understood this better than Barbara Tuchman, who won two Pulitzer Prizes while conclusively disproving the elitist view of “popular history” as an oxymoron. The author of such works as The Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, Tuchman set a standard for historical scholarship that any academician might envy, and she did so without benefit of a PhD. Indeed, she declared her failure to secure the ultimate academic credential—a distinction, she archly noted, likewise withheld from Thucydides, Gibbon and Parkman—an undisguised blessing, given her desire to write for nonhistorians. In a collection of essays entitled Practicing History, Tuchman vividly conveyed her own sense of literary obligation:
