Name Arthur Herman Role Historian | ||
Nominations Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction Books How the Scots Invented t, Gandhi and Churchill, The Cave and the Light: Plat, Freedom's Forge, To Rule the Waves: How the Similar People Winston Churchill, Joseph McCarthy, Mahatma Gandhi | ||
Education University of Minnesota | ||
Arthur L. Herman (born 1956) is an American popular historian, currently serving as a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. He generally employs the Great Man perspective in his work, which is 19th Century historical methodology attributing human events and their outcomes to the singular efforts of great men that has been refined and qualified by such modern thinkers as Sidney Hook.
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Biography
Herman received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University. He spent a semester abroad at Edinburgh University in Scotland. His 1984 dissertation dealt with the political thought of early-17th-century French Huguenots. His father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. In 1987 Herman married Beth Marla Warshofsky.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Herman taught at Sewanee: The University of the South, George Mason University, Georgetown and The Catholic University of America. Herman has also appeared at the Smithsonian's Campus on the Mall program.
His 2001 book on the Scottish Enlightenment, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, was a New York Times bestseller.
In 2008, he added to his body of work Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.