100 Books Like A Street Through Time

I am an art and architectural historian whose field also includes the histories of cities. My area of specialty is Africa. I am also a professor at Harvard who has lived in Cambridge, Ma. for over 30 years where I have become a civic leader, co-founding the Harvard Square Neighborhood Association to help bring improvements to the city and preserve historic buildings here. I teach a class on Harvard Square (and the city of Cambridge) and following January 6, I felt it was important to rethink the way we teach young people – encouraging them to understand the diversity of all our communities. 

I am an art and architectural historian whose field also includes the histories of cities. My area of specialty is Africa. I am also a professor at Harvard who has lived in Cambridge, Ma. for over 30 years where I have become a civic leader, co-founding the Harvard Square Neighborhood Association to help bring improvements to the city and preserve historic buildings here. I teach a class on Harvard Square (and the city of Cambridge) and following January 6, I felt it was important to rethink the way we teach young people – encouraging them to understand the diversity of all our communities. 

I am an art and architectural historian whose field also includes the histories of cities. My area of specialty is Africa. I am also a professor at Harvard who has lived in Cambridge, Ma. for over 30 years where I have become a civic leader, co-founding the Harvard Square Neighborhood Association to help bring improvements to the city and preserve historic buildings here. I teach a class on Harvard Square (and the city of Cambridge) and following January 6, I felt it was important to rethink the way we teach young people – encouraging them to understand the diversity of all our communities. 

I am an art and architectural historian whose field also includes the histories of cities. My area of specialty is Africa. I am also a professor at Harvard who has lived in Cambridge, Ma. for over 30 years where I have become a civic leader, co-founding the Harvard Square Neighborhood Association to help bring improvements to the city and preserve historic buildings here. I teach a class on Harvard Square (and the city of Cambridge) and following January 6, I felt it was important to rethink the way we teach young people – encouraging them to understand the diversity of all our communities. 

I grew up in Minnesota, and although I have not lived there for most of my adult life, it will always be home for me. I miss the prairie, the lakes, and the wide open skies; I even miss the winters. So I love reading good books set in the Midwest. To me these five books exemplify all that is best about Midwesterners: their honesty, their modesty, their connection to the land; their belief in themselves, and in the interesting and good people in this part of the country. Each of these writers shows that sometimes you can go home again: and that it can be worth it to do so. 

I write children’s books, both fiction and non-fiction, including One Duck Stuck, Big Momma Makes the World, Rattletrap Car, Plant a Pocket of Prairie, and, in collaboration with Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Liza Ketchum, Begin With A Bee, a picture book about the federally endangered rusty-patched bumblebee. Recently I have been putting my garden to bed for the winter, pulling tomato vines, harvesting beans that have dried on the vine, cutting herbs, and planting cloves of garlic to grow into heads in next year’s garden. In a couple of months snow will bury the garden beds, and the only gardens will be in the pages of books. Here are five of the children’s books that I love about growing things.

I’ve gone to France often during my life. I always buy books that look interesting while I’m there, mainly to keep my French in good shape. I tend to pick authors and subjects which catch my eye. Some get discarded, but most give a fascinating and often very different perspective on life than I find in English novels and essays. 

In spite of many setbacks, living standards have trended upwards over the last 10,000 years. One of my main interests as an economist has been to understand the sources of this trend and its broad effects. The key driving force is new technologies. We are better off than our Victorian ancestors, not because we have more of what they had but because we have new things, such as airplanes and indoor plumbing. However, these new technologies have also brought some unfortunate side effects. We need to understand that dealing with these successfully depends, not on returning to the use of previous technologies, but on developing newer technologies such as wind and solar power.

During my career as an author, I have written on everything from U.S. Presidents to natural disasters. My true passion, however, is military history, a subject I have followed closely since childhood. Why? I have no idea. Nevertheless, I have read widely on the subject and, with the publication of Outnumbered, fulfilled a longstanding dream. The early modern period of European history, during which the continent’s culture left behind the Middle Ages and laid the foundations of the world we live in today, was an era rife with military change and innovation, as well as endemic conflict and the emergence of powerful, centralized nation-states, all of which I find enthralling. These books bring this time and place to life.

I am a historian of the early Middle Ages, focusing mainly on the intellectual and cultural history of the post-Roman Barbarian kingdoms of the West. I have always been fascinated by cultural encounters and clashes of civilizations, and it did not take long before the passage from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, which witnessed the transformation of the Roman World, the rise of Christianity, and the emergence of the Barbarian kingdoms, grabbed my attention and became my main focus of academic interest. I have published and edited several books and numerous papers, most of which challenge perceived notions of early medieval culture and society in one way or another.