Yes - History can be fun and interesting to read and learn about, contrary to what some of you mis-learned in school. It's never ceased to amaze me how boring some people can make history considering how exciting and interesting it can be. I coachs/P.E. teachers who taught us American History in junior high and high school days. It was terrible, they were bored with the subject and it showed - I thought I hated history, until my first year of college.
I had a great professor - Dr. Martin Lutter who loved history and let us read novels, and various fiction and non-fiction works, to learn about history. He loved history. He was the total absent-minded professor type. He'd come to class with a big stack of books filled with little book marks and put them on his podium and then just start talking....he was fascinating, he loved what he was doing and had so much energy it rubbed off on his students.
This is the book by Craig Nelson -
There's an interview with Craig Nelson on the Book Guy's Archives #640 which was on C-Span BOOK TV.ORG this afternoon. From the interview it sounded like his book on Thomas Paine was fun to write and will be fun to read.
This Wired 3.05: The Age of Paine article by Jon Katz says of Paine -
"If any father has been forsaken by his children, it is Thomas Paine. Statues of the man should greet incoming journalism students; his words should be chiseled above newsroom doors and taped to laptops, guiding the communications media through their many travails, controversies, and challenges. Yet Paine, a fuzzy historical figure of the 1700s, is remembered mostly for one or two sparkling patriotic quotes - "These are the times that try men's souls" - and little else."
