When the Historian Becomes the Story: A Conversation with Alan Strauss-Schom

Alan Strauss-Schom has devoted himself to resurrecting the lives of others. His biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III, and the great dramas of the Napoleonic era established him as one of the foremost narrative historians of his generation, a scholar whose meticulous archival research has always been matched by a novelist's eye for character and scene. His work reminds us that history is not merely a sequence of events, but an accumulation of human choices, ambitions, disappointments, and improbable turns of fate.