The Mind of a Historian

Here is a rich book—a dozen essays, of uneven quality, some hitherto unpublished, some published in inaccessible places, which, taken together, offer a conspectus of Herbert Gutman’s energetic genius. Yet the volume would seem shapeless and sprawling—now labor struggles in the Gilded Age, now coal miners on the prairie, now the post-emancipation efforts of black communities to found and support their own schools—if it were not for the introductory study by the book’s editor, Ira Berlin.

This seventy-page essay is outstanding, a model of what such a study ought to be but almost never is. This is far more than a conventional tribute paid to a friend and fellow scholar. Berlin has read with care all of Gutman’...