Keeping Time

Download or read book Keeping Time written by Peter N. Carroll and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once memoir and meditation, Keeping Time records one professional historian's 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 way—not as something remote from the present, but as a vital current in everyone's 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.