Book excerpt: A collection of memorable, stirring, and eloquent historical essays, designed to help any historian write more artfully Is there any reason serious historical scholarship cannot receive literary expression? Even the most committed empiricists and postmodernists might achieve better results by thinking of writing as a craft, rather than a means of packaging research. This book gathers some of the most compelling efforts to make history writing eloquent, stirring, and memorable, demonstrating that even the most rigorous scholarship can take on a wide range of creative forms. With selections from: Jonathan Spence, Simon Schama, Saidiya Hartman, Wendy Warren, Jill Lepore, Louis Masur, Jane Kamensky, and John Demos, among others.