The Historian's Craft: Gertrude Himmelfarb Acton Line

Gertrude Himmelfarb was one of the foremost historians of Victorian life. She produced page-turning biographies of some of the age’s most intriguing and influential figures, including Lord Acton, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. She also produced social histories of the period and brought a Victorian sensibility to American politics as a leading conservative public intellectual.
In this episode, Acton librarian and research associate Dan Hugger speaks with Nicole Penn, author of an essay just published in National Affairs entitled “The Historian’s Craft,” which deftly explores the life and legacy of one of the conservative movement’s most accomplished women.
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The Historian's Craft | National Affairs
Middlemarch | George Eliot
The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments | Gertrude Himmelfarb
The Moral Imagination: From Adam Smith to Lionel Trilling: Gertrude Himmelfarb
Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals: Ronnie Grinberg
Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics | Gertrude Himmelfarb
The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age | Gertrude Himmelfarb
The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals, Rev. Ed. | Gertrude Himmelfarb
Glad to the Brink of Fear | Nicole Penn
A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 | Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao | The Seen and the Unseen
Historian of the Liberal Paradox | Gertrude Himmelfarb
Remembering Gertrude Himmelfarb with Yuval Levin | Acton Line
Learning from Victorian Virtues | Interview with Gertrude Himmelfarb