Samuel A. Forman is an historian, Harvard University faculty member, and businessman. He is educated in the history of the American Revolution as well as the practice of clinical and preventive medicine. Throughout his successful careers as physician, military officer and businessman, he has published and lectured on historical topics that inform current issues.
Forman’s ambitious debut was the award winning non-fiction American Founder’s biography Dr. Joseph Warren – The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty [Pelican, 2012]. His rollicking non-fiction pioneer origin tale of the American West and South during the Revolutionary Era – ‘Ill-Fated Frontier: Peril and Possibilities in the Early American West is due for publication by Lyons Press next year. The book's website includes the author's notes, https://illfatedfrontier.com/end-notes/ .
1. How and when did you get hooked on history?
Growing up in Philadelphia, school trips often included Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell as educational and inspirational destinations practically in our back yard, Early on, I acquired a hands-on and up-close appreciation for our national heritage.
2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?
I am on a quest to understand what is special about the United States, and to understand both the best of our history and the skeletons rattling in our collective closet. On a personal level, I frequently invoke the experiences and precepts of the Founders. I seek to emulate them at their best.
3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career?
As an historian, research into primary sources and locations, writing, and scholarly interactions comprise a large part of my activities. I apply the same rigor to accurately ground my histories and insights on a foundation of primary sources and authoritative scholarship, as I do in my roles in the health sector.
4. Why is studying/knowing history important?
As the old saying goes, you cannot know where you are going if you do not know from whence you came. The historian Santayana had a more practical take on this thought: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?
The American Revolutionary Era is my favorite since it is foundational for our country and is relevant to understanding modern controversies. I do like origin stories. This period contains an inordinate number of them.
6. People are probably surprised that the man who wrote a biography of Joseph Warren and a new book about frontier settlement has a background in medicine and is a member of the Environmental Health faculty at Harvard. How does that happen?
Dr. Joseph Warren, the Revolutionary War heroic politician and soldier, was a physician for all but the last two months of a short and eventful life. Warren's medical accounts comprise the largest surviving cache of records he personally wrote, key source material that other biographers can hardly and often erroneously decipher. As someone educated and enthusiastic about the American Revolution and the history of medicine, I realized early on that my background enabled me to be peculiarly well equipped to bring Joseph Warren to a modern audience. I have extended comparable enthusiasm for the era, and rigorous use of archival primary sources, to understand the dynamics between North and South during the pivotal earliest years of our nation. The fact that 'Ill-Fated Frontier' is also a rollicking and true frontier adventure was an added inducement to research and write it.
As a Harvard faculty member, the same high standards of method and writing are expected regardless of departmental affiliation.
7. Your latest book is Ill-Fated Frontier: Peril and Possibilities in the Early American West. What makes this book and story unique?
On one level it is a rousing, true pioneer and settlement adventure along the very wild Western and Southern frontiers in the earliest years of the Republic, whose key personalities were shaped by their experiences during the Revolutionary War. It includes points of view rarely told in an integrated way - the plantation entrepreneurs, their numerous African American slaves, Indians violently resisting their enterprise, and surprisingly suave and effective Spanish Colonials. At the same time it is story of how North and South are inextricably linked. It foreshadows sectional tensions that persist to the current day.
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