Keeping Time

At once memoir and meditation, Keeping Time records one professional historians struggle to live in history even as he studies it, writes about it, and teaches it. Exploring the omnipresence of the past in American life today, Peter N. Carroll weaves into his autobiographical narrative a wealth of provocative observations on the practice of history, the connections between small lives and large forces, and the relationship of personal choice to public activity. Carroll feels compelled to view the past in a different waynot as something remote from the present, but as a vital current in everyones life. He strives to popularize history, reminding us that the particulars of ordinary life are indeed historical, that all human beings, however obscure or important, exist in time, and that each must live in history.