But Enough about Me—Let’s Talk about My Book

Laura Beach of Antiques and the Arts recently interviewed me about how I got into researching and writing history and then creating this blog. Here’s a taste of that exchange:

How broad is public interest in American history?

American history at this level is a niche interest, but, like any niche, it has fervent followers. The way media is going, it’s all niches and fervent followers. Americans are interested in parts of history they see as significant to the nation: the settlement period, the founding, the Civil War, for instance. People who write about these periods in a dramatic fashion, which doesn’t necessarily mean poorly researched, really grab a nerve.

Go here for the rest.

If that’s not enough of me, Lee Wright of The History List archived my session at the Pioneer Valley History Camp earlier this summer. My talk, drawn from The Road to Concord, was titled “How the British Empire Lost New England Seven Months Before the Revolutionary War.” That video is here.

Lee shared two more talks as well:

• Thomas Christian Williams discussing how Thomas Jefferson anonymously translated Volney’s The Ruins of Empires.
• Darren Berry linking Fitchburg’s public memory of the Revolution with its support for Abolitionism and post-Civil War civil rights.

Speaking of The Road to Concord, it’s received some nice reviews on Amazon, for which I’m very grateful. One reader called for a movie adaptation. Another felt the book has too much information for his taste, and I’m just going to have to live with that. I do load it on.