Prof. David Hackett Fischer

I recently received an email informing me that one of my most admired college professors, David Hackett Fischer, is retiring. IJN readers who are Brandeis alumni, or perhaps parents of Brandeis students, may be familiar with this name. Fischer is an expert in early American history, and he pioneered an approach to teaching history that went way beyond facts and figures. He also coined the term “historian’s fallacy,” a sort-of historians’ version of Monday morning quarterbacking. Fischer pointed out that historians, when conducting their retrospective analysis — must take into account that their research subjects had no way of seeing into the future. I was privileged to be one of his students, in a small seminar course entitled “The Literature of American History.” We delved […]