In 1992, in a review article published in the AHR, Michael Kazin wrote, Historians, like most people, are reluctant to sympathize with people whose political opinions they detest. Overwhelmingly cosmopolitan in their cultural tastes and liberal or radical in their politics, scholars of modern America have largely eschewed research projects about past movements that seem to them either bastions of a crumbling status quo or the domain of puritanical, pathological yahoos.* If Kazin was one of those reluctant historians, he got over it, at least temporarily.  As I have said before on this blog, his biography of William Jennings Bryan Read more