Author: Brittany Von Kamp, recent graduate from the History M.A. program

When pursuing a publisher for his book manuscript Beyond Truman: Robert H. Ferrell and Crafting the Past (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), author Dr. Douglas Dixon responded with a laugh—that several editors rejected the book’s thrust, saying: “Nobody cares about historians.” Dixon explained that this was a major hurdle in getting the book to readers who, in fact, do care about the challenges faced by past masters in doing history.  What challenged Ferrell, as the field evolved into the twenty-first century was postmodernism, the New Left, and social and cultural history.  Though Dixon feels Ferrell is an important person to study, the book is much more than merely a study of this important presidential, diplomatic, and military historian, though his biography is central to it. Instead, the author had to find a way to make Ferrell’s world larger than the historian himself, to fit Ferrell into the larger historical narrative – a task that many historians face as they write about their own research. In the end, Dixon says that “the book is not just about Ferrell; it’s about the larger culture of history and doing history,” particularly in the last half of the twentieth century to the present day.