A Hot Young Author With a Fresh Slant on History

By Liz McMillen

What makes for an award-winning history book these days?

For starters, select a topic that has been peripheral to the understanding of American history and place it at center stage. Make sure the history is not strictly political or economic but social and cultural, blending family life and gender relations with new anthropological theory. And as author, take a hot young historian who just happened to have won a MacArthur Fellowship when he was only three years out of graduate