Professor Diggins's field is intellectual history, which, as he has written elsewhere, deals with how the mind and character of an era are formed by historical experience. It is a discipline that encourages new ways of exploring the Reagan puzzle, and these free him from the useless clichés about movie acting, dozing in Cabinet meetings, and passing out jelly beans in the Oval Office. Could Reagan have been a nineteenth-century Transcendentalist? If a distinguished professor of the City University of New York Graduate Center thinks so, it may be worth considering.

Thus he suggests that Reagan's 1984 campaign slogan—"It's morning in America"—can be seen as a quintessential expression of an Emersonian spirit.

Thus one of the virtues of This Mighty Scourge, a collection of fugitive pieces -- some of them previously published, some of them not, all of them revised for book publication -- is that it gives us McPherson as a reader and critic of other historians' work. Many of the pieces here were originally written for the New York Review of Books, for which McPherson serves as de facto Civil War gatekeeper, and they touch -- lightly but confidently -- upon much recent Civil War scholarship.

Shades of old Colorado

By Sandra Dallas
Special to The Denver Post

Article Last Updated: 02/08/2007 10:05:30 PM MST

"Exotic and Traditional: Opera in Denver - 1879-2006," by Allen Young (Pilgrims Process, 252 pages, $20.95)

Allen Young has covered the Denver arts scene longer than most performers have been alive. So when he tells the story of opera in the city, he writes from a vast store of knowledge, much of it personal.