Photo: Courtesy of Bucknell University Archives Meet the Sarah
Palin Enthusiast Who May Have Been the Best American Historian
of His Generation American history   By Photo: Courtesy of
Bucknell University Archives  Martin J. Sklar—an American
historian and political thinker—died on April 27 at his home in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Sklar’s final wishes were to have
neither a funeral nor an obituary. I hadn't talked to him in
almost a decade, but my suspicion is that these were the wishes
of a man who felt he had not been given his due in life, and
would not get it in death. I don’t intend what follows as an
obituary, nor as a tribute to the man (toward whom I had mixed
feelings), but as an appreciation of his very substantial, but
insufficiently recognized, intellectual contribution to American
history.  Sklar was a historian and was proud of his profession.
He was also a dedicated teacher. He got into a fight with his
colleagues at Bucknell, he once told me, because he insisted
that the regular senior faculty