David Hackett Fischer

Historian David Hackett Fischer, who has played a pivotal role in reviving popular and academic interest in American history and its lessons for the present, has been selected as the recipient of the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award for 2006. He will receive the award and deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at the Institute’s annual dinner on March 8, 2006, at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Professor Fischer is a pioneer among historians who are combining modern methods of research and interpretation with renewed appreciation for the importance of contingency, choice, and character in the unfolding of the American drama. His bestselling books Washington’s Crossing (Oxford, 2004), which received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in History, and Paul Revere’s Ride (Oxford, 1994) are more than meticulous retellings of great revolutionary events: they provide readers with a vivid sense of how the events were experienced in the immediate moment and of how they affected choices and decisions yet to come. Jonathan Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Paul Revere’s Ride is “narrated by a professional historian with a scholar’s command of the facts and a gift for storytelling. Indeed, the book turns out to be a tale of adventure and intrigue so vivid and so colorful that it sometimes reads like a thriller rather than a historical monograph.”

Distinguishing his approach from other historians, Professor Fischer writes in Washington’s Crossing: “In the late twentieth century, too many scholars tried to make the American past into a record of crime and folly. Too many writers have told us that we are captives of our darker selves and helpless victims of our history. It isn’t so, and never was. The story of Washington’s Crossing tells us that Americans in an earlier generation were capable of acting in a higher spirit--and so are we.”

Although he describes himself as “primarily a storyteller and old-fashioned history teacher,” Professor Fischer’s historical narratives are also notable for their deep illumination of social and cultural circumstance. And two of his most important works are path-breaking studies of the roots of essential American character traits. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1989) shows how the differing cultures of the British immigrant groups that settled Massachusetts, Virginia, the Delaware Valley, and the Western frontier produced distinctive habits, beliefs, and styles of individualism in those regions persisting far into the future. Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas (Oxford, 2005) portrays American notions of liberty and freedom as arising not from abstract political theories or historical forces but from lived experience. Among Professor Fischer’s other major books are The Great Wave: Price Movements in Modern History (Oxford, 1996); Growing Old in America (Oxford, 1977); and Historians’ Fallacies (Harper & Row, 1970).

David Hackett Fischer was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, where his father was superintendent of schools. He earned his A.B. from Princeton University (1958) and his Ph.D. in history from the Johns Hopkins University (1962). He has been teaching history at Brandeis University since 1962, where he has received numerous teaching awards and was appointed the Earl Warren Professor of History in 1971 and University Professor in 2003. He has held visiting professorships at Harvard University, Oxford University, the University of Washington (Seattle), and several universities in New Zealand. Professor Fischer and his wife, Judith Hummel Fischer, have two children and two grandchildren.

Professor Fischer follows renowned Peruvian novelist and political thinker Mario Vargas Llosa as the 2006 recipient of the Irving Kristol Award--AEI’s highest award--which recognizes individuals who have made extraordinary intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy or social welfare. The award was established in 2002 in honor of AEI senior fellow Irving Kristol, replacing the Institute’s Francis Boyer Award, which had been awarded annually for the previous twenty-five years.