TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – University of Alabama Libraries will welcome acclaimed historian and author Forrest McDonald for a book talk and signing of his most recent book, “Recovering the Past: a historian’s memoir,” at 4 p.m. Sept. 23 on the second floor of Gorgas Library on the UA campus.

McDonald, Distinguished University Research Professor Emeritus of History at UA, is a legend in his own time. Named the 16th Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is one of the most eminent historians and the author of numerous provocative works on the early American Republic, the Constitution and the American presidency.

In this book he candidly recounts and reconsiders his own career, mixing in equal measure autobiography and a sharp critique of the historical craft.

Beginning in 1949, McDonald has traveled the sometimes rocky academic road from Brown University to Wayne State and finally to The University of Alabama. He rose to prominence by arguing against the popular histories of Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard, and his rebuttal of Beard was published as his seminal book “We the People.”

“Recovering the Past” carries forward this critical tradition. “The norm is to write for one’s fellow historians, but that seems to me to be wrong-headed and to result in stultifying reading” McDonald said in the books’ preface. “I have chosen, instead, to write for that elusive critter called the general reader, or more precisely, for the vast number of people who genuinely love history for its own sake – which, as will become evident, I regard as eliminating a sizable majority of professional historians.”

His previous books include “Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution,” “The American Presidency: An Intellectual History,” “States’ Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776-1876,” and volumes on the presidencies of Washington and Jefferson.