You've heard him on public radio, the sensible, historically minded voice sought out to give some context to the political news of the moment — and boy, isn't there a lot of it. You've noted his timely books, one being "Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past," written with Kevin Kruse. Maybe you know he teaches history and public affairs at Princeton.
Julian E. Zelizer.
Now he'll be in conversation with a fellow Sag Harborite, David M. Alpern, former senior editor at Newsweek, a journalist well acquainted with the art of the interview through his radio work. The subject, at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton on Monday at 6 p.m., will be the state of partisanship in our troubled nation.
Specifically, Mr. Zelizer's "In Defense of Partisanship," out earlier this year from Columbia Global Reports and reviewed by Mr. Alpern in this newspaper in March, an assessment describing how the author looks not at partisanship as a dirty word in politics today, but rather "back at a partisanship that was and ahead to what it might be."
Registration in advance is required and can be done at the Rogers Memorial website.