Books by David E. Stannard

The Puritan Way of Death is more than a book about Puritans or about death. It is also about family, community, and identity in the modern world. Even before publication, eminent historians, sociologists, and religious scholars in the United States and Europea-among them, Gordon Wood, Philippe Ariès, William Clebsch, and Robert Nisbet-hailed it as a "pathbreaking, provocative, and exciting" work, a "terse, urbane, learned, clear, humane" volume.

Studies the burgeoning field of psychohistory - from Freud, its primogenitor, to its present-day academic practitioners - and argues that little, if any, psychohistory is good histor. The author systematically points out the pitfalls, sheer irrationality, and ultimately ahistorical nature of this mode of historical inquiry.