The memoir of a history professor who failed to get tenure at several of the nation’s highest universities is normally of interest—barely—to beloved former students as well as ex-colleagues targeted by his jabs. A Life in History has that audience locked up, but its author, David Kaiser, has a few things to say of wider interest. A one-time professor at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon, Kaiser rues the decline of understaffed, underfunded college history departments whose work is slighted in favor of that oxymoron, political “science,” and dubious forms of sociology. He points out that the increasingly narrow specialization of academic historians has diminished student interest in history and the field’s influence on contemporary events. Lack of concern for the past has always been a stimulus for repeating—even amplifying—past mistakes.
