A Historian’s Diary: Gordon Craig and the teaching of history at Stanford

Program Video
Event Photos *No log-in is required. Close any Facebook log-in pop-up window by clicking the "x" on the top-right hand corner and you will be able to browse the collection of photos. To view any photo in close-up, click on its thumbnail.
Visit this page to order A Historian 's Diary, 1935-1980

This program, with a presentation by James Sheehan, celebrated the publication of a rich selection from the diaries of Gordon Craig, probably the most prominent American historian of Germany. Sheehan also used Craig’s diaries to illuminate the changing ways in which history was, and is, taught at Stanford. 

Gordon Craig taught for many years at Stanford. He was a keen commentator on his field and its activities, as well as the university and its life. Edited by Edward Kehler and Bruce Thompson, A Historian’s Diary, 1935-1980 is witty, trenchant, elegant, and should be of particular interest to many. Both James Sheehan, Craig’s distinguished successor as the historian of Germany in the Stanford History Department, and Craig spent their careers informing undergraduates and training graduate students in German history. Gordon Craig wrote, among other books, Germany 1866-1945 and James Sheehan German History 1770-1866 that tell the troubled history of modern Germany. Sheehan also recently published Essays on German History and Historians. 

James J. Sheehan is Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History emeritus. He has written seven books and edited several others, mostly on German history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His most recent work is Making a Modern Political Order, published by Notre Dame University Press in 2023. The winner of four awards for outstanding teaching, he has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University, the Wissenschaftskolleg and the American Academy in Berlin, won the Humboldt Research Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Orden pour le Mérite, and is a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2005 he served as president of the American Historical Association.

This program is co-sponsored by the Stanford Libraries and the Department of History.