Humanities Faculty

Robert A. Rosenstone

Professor of History
Founding Editor, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice
Associate Editor, Film Historia

Research interests

History on film; modern culture, biography, and the Modern Age.

Research Statement

My current research runs along two parallel lines, continuing the investigation of issues that have concerned me for the last two decades. One involves the intensely contemporary issue: what it means to construct works of history in a culture where the visual and the electronic media are not only supplementing but to a great extent replacing the written word as the chief means of communication. The other line has to do with creating alternative ways of presenting history (on the page, on the screen, on the internet), which of necessity involves questions of the relationship between historical data and argument, as well as that between fact and fiction.

Publications

Books: AUTHOR

• Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion and the Spanish Civil War - 1969
• Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed - 1975
• Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters in Meiji Japan - 1988
• Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History - 1995
• King of Odessa - 2003
• The Man Who Swam Into History - 2005
• History on Film / Film on History - 2006

Books: EDITOR AND CO-AUTHOR

• Protest from the Right - 1968
• Seasons of Rebellion: Protest and Radicalism in Recent America - 1972
• Los cantos de la conmocion: Veinte años de rock - 1974
• Revisioning History: Filmmakers and the Construction of the Past - 1995
• Experiments in Rethinking History - 2004