John Keegan is the best historian that I have read -- and I’ve read a few. His The Face of Battle is a remarkable book; I’ve read it four or five times, and each time I return to it I find new depth in it, new understanding of the factors that affect human behavior on the field of fire. Don’t call what Keegan practices "military history," either: he draws on a broad and deep mastery of world history, the humanities, and the liberal arts to illuminate his subjects.  

Speaking of history: have you read Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners? It is a very controversial book: Goldhagen hammers home his thesis without compromise, citing instance after instance of ordinary German citizens cheerfully tormenting, torturing, and murdering their Jewish neighbors in the 1920s, 30s, and during World War II. Critics of the book say that Goldhagen is too single-minded in condemning the German people as a whole, and perhaps they are right. But the weight of his evidence is powerful, and I believe that he has obsoleted the arguments of previous analysts of the Holocaust, who often tried to explain unspeakable acts by reference to complicated theories of the behavior of masses and other psychosocial exegeses. It seems to me that that stuff just won’t do now.  

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about John Brown.  Oates’s biography of him is pretty good; Russell Banks’s novelization is even better (I still haven’t read a biography as good as Huey Long, by T. Harry Williams).  Recently I’ve been doing some research online about Brown and other people and themes in his time as part of my work for a project at Assumption College called E Pluribus Unum (www.assumption.edu/ahc). Take a look at the site, and follow some of the internal and external links.  This is, in my prejudiced opinion, good history.  The web site is being created by John McClymer and Lucia Knoles at Assumption.  McClymer and Knoles are two smart scholars whose knowledge of U.S. History is matched only by their excellent work at integrating online skills and content seamlessly into their research and classes.