James Gilbert - Tales of Little Egypt: A Fictional Account of Small Town Life between the Civil War and the Great Influenza Plague of 1918 -

James Gilbert - Tales of Little Egypt: A Fictional Account of Small Town Life in America Between the Civil War and the Great Influenza Plague of 1918. This is episode 426 of Teaching Learning Leading K12, an audio podcast.<br /><br />Over the course of his career as a historian, James Gilbert published 11 history texts, one of which (Perfect Cities) was named a New York Times notable book of the year in 1986. Throughout his career, he has often succumbed to a love of travel made possible by teaching at the University of Paris and Warwick University in England, and with Fulbright Awards, at the University of Sydney, the University of Amsterdam, Erfurt and Tubingen Universities in Germany, and Uppsala University in Sweden, where he was given an honorary Doctoral Degree. Until 2020, he was the Faculty Fulbright Adviser at the University of Maryland. <br /><br />Born in Chicago, Gilbert attended Carleton College and then the University of Wisconsin, earning a doctoral degree in American Intellectual and Cultural History. In 1966, he was hired by the University of Maryland. He was appointed Distinguished University Professor in 1999. While American history has been his profession, literature has been his passion, and since retirement, he has written three novels and a book of short stories. He is also an amateur cellist.<br /><br /> <br /><br />A little about Tales of Little Egypt…<br /><br /> <br /><br />Tales of Little Egypt is a fictional account of small-town America and the peculiar, ordinary, eccentric, sturdy, cunning, and contented characters who created it. Set in the years between the Civil War and the great Influenza Plague of 1918, this is a pageant of imaginary people--the narratives of a score of men, women, and children whose lives illustrate the immense changes and challenges of that turbulent era. This was a period of great events and outsized personalities: splendid World’s Fairs attended by millions, radical new inventions, devastating wars and violent revolutions and leaders like Theodore Roosevelt