Paul Johnson’s Historic Times - The journalist and popular historian and lover of America dies at age 94.
Jan. 13, 2023 6:41 pm ET
There’s an old joke that academics bitterly complain about popular historians for the high sin of publishing books people enjoy reading. Few working journalists have written history with as much elan and narrative force as the British author Paul Johnson, who died this week at age 94.
Johnson spent his early career editing the New Statesman, later contributing to the Spectator, Commentary and others, including these pages. His more than 50 books range from “The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830” to “Art: A New History” to histories of the United States, Christianity and the Jews.
“Obviously,” George W. Bush quipped in 2006 when presenting Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, “the man is not afraid to take on big subjects.”
His most broadly influential book, first published in 1983, was “Modern Times,” a history of the 20th century from the 1920s to the 1980s. It opens with the confirmation of the theory of relativity in 1919 and is propelled for more than 800 pages by this core thesis: “There are no inevitabilities in history.”
is narrative then proves the point by showing how ideas and the individuals who wielded them helped to shape the last bloody century, for horribly worse and then into the 1980s for better. The study of history, Johnson wrote elsewhere, is “a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance.”
Johnson later produced concise biographies aimed at capturing the public’s imagination about Socrates, Napoleon and other giants. His 192-page volume about Winston Churchill is better than others that are three times the length, and it closes with lessons from the famous Prime Minister’s life: “In a sense his whole career was an exercise in how courage can be displayed, reinforced, guarded and doled out carefully, heightened and concentrated, conveyed to others.”
Though he was British, his writing often concerned the United States, which he called a “marvelous” country, as he told these pages in 2011; “a working multiracial democracy” and “the greatest of all human adventures.” That view is unfashionable now on the American left and even the so-called nationalist conservative right, most of whose denizens could benefit from reading Johnson’s “A History of the American People,” which invites readers in with this subversive opening note:
“I have not bowed to current academic nostrums about nomenclature or accepted the flyblown philacteries of Political Correctness. So I do not acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans or any other qualified kind. They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen.”
His histories line many a bookshelf and will educate for decades to come.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-johnson-dies-age-94-historian-author-modern-times-america-11673649939