And they’re read by people like my friend on the train who aren’t exactly like me.Įvery morning, after I wake up, I read the New York Times. But they’re written in broad strokes and brief word-counts. They’re works of history too, drawing on the past to illuminate the present.

All I knew was that this kind, smart, and thoroughly engaged citizen would probably never read the type of historical monographs that I write. what, exactly? An “expert?” A “professional?” Or, God forbid, an “academic?” I stuttered, searching in vain for just the right word. “And you call yourself an historian?” my friend asked. I did attempt to watch an episode of Burns’ Civil War with my wife, many years ago, but we both fell asleep before it was over. I hadn’t seen Gladiator or Braveheart, even though each film earned a Best Picture award at the Oscars. So did Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time, about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, but I hadn’t read that either. I was embarrassed to admit that I had never read a word by David McCullough, whose Truman and Adams biographies both won Pulitzer Prizes. “And what do you think of McCullough?” my new friend asked. He had recently completed McCullough’s massive biography of Harry Truman, and he was just now starting the same author’s equally hefty tome on John Adams. But his all-time favorite historian was David McCullough. He loved Ken Burns’ TV documentaries, especially The Civil War and Baseball.

His preferred films were Gladiator (“Five stars!” he gushed) and Braveheart. The books included No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin Band of Brothers, by Stephen Ambrose and Theodore Rex, by Edmund Morris. He proceeded to list his favorite historical books, movies, and television shows. When I told him I was an historian, he beamed. The speaker was an elderly gentleman, seated next to me on a train. Zimmerman conducts an annual workshop on writing op-eds at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He also appears every other week on WHYY, Philadelphia’s National Public Radio affiliate, to discuss current events in historical perspective. Zimmerman has published over 300 op-eds in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers and magazines. He is the author of Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education (Princeton, 2015) and four other books. Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at New York University.

Too hot to handle jonathan zimmerman