David Hackett Fischer

Washington's Crossing takes a painting everyone knows and asks what was actually happening around it: the condition of the army that crossed the Delaware on Christmas night in 1776, why the Hessian garrison at Trenton was beaten, and how restraint in the treatment of prisoners became a deliberate American policy rather than an accident of circumstance. Oxford University Press published it in 2004 and it took the Pulitzer Prize for history the year after. David Hackett Fischer was born in Baltimore in 1935 and spent his career at Brandeis University as University Professor. Albion's Seed traced four British folkways into American regional culture and is argued with still; Historians' Fallacies, from 1970, catalogues the ways historical reasoning goes wrong and is the book most often pressed on graduate students. Paul Revere's Ride and African Founders follow the same method, narrative built on close evidence.