![]() ![]() Consider the ways that Tana French immerses you in the very particular world of a working-class Irish family, with such distinctive dialogue and bristling, passive-aggressive familial relations, and you’ll know what I mean. If mystery writers need to evoke all the nubbly uniqueness of a particular city or landscape or character, historians need to underline the myriad and memorable ways that the past is a foreign country. Likewise, the fact that he struggled throughout his life with an opium habit allowed me to discuss the surprising fact that virtually all early Americans simply didn’t see opium as habit-forming they celebrated it as a wonder drug in a world otherwise lacking in painkillers. When I discovered that James Ogilvie, the “strange genius” and celebrity orator at the heart of my book, wore a toga during his eloquent performances, I dedicated an entire chapter to unpacking what those togas looked like in the early 19 th century and what they meant to American audiences. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity. I thought a lot about those lessons as I developed my most recent book, The Strange Genius of Mr. But we nevertheless find wonderfully weird and surprising things along the way. ![]() Historians don’t set out to solve mysteries. ![]()
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