A Life in History

Creative Type Productions, 2024

For half a century, in 20 books, Ray Raphael has explored societal and historical themes by highlighting the experience of unsung individuals, from Revolutionary War farmwives to backcountry woodsmen in California. Their lives were shaped by forces at play in a particular epoch. Now, at age eighty, Raphael surveys the forces that shaped his life—the civil rights and anti-war struggles of the 1960s, the back-to-the-land migration of the ’70s, and the more recent insistence by marginalized groups and historians for inclusive and honest narratives of our nation’s founding. “I would not be ‘me’ if born into a different society or at a different time,” he writes. “We each navigate public spaces, affected by our surroundings and in turn leaving our marks.” Perhaps, upon reading what he records, you will probe your own “life in history.” 

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