This volume of collected essays intends to highlight the interaction of people and ideas. The grouping of essays focuses on the relationship of people and events. Considered altogether, this collection regards lives observed as a source of historical insight. Yet this bias depends intrinsically on the historical era. History, therefore, remains very close to the center of each piece. This book advances the thesis that the study of biography makes history better understood. Animating History is made up of seven chapters: Ideas and Men; Why Plutarch?; Ideas and Women; Historic Friendships; Anglo-American Rapprochement; Jesuit Presence; and Biography/Autobiography. An introduction develops the main themes of the material included, and a summing up draws out the lessons learned from the lives of the historical persons treated. It is the collective impact of the seven chapters that gives a full statement and meaning of the value of biography as history. Yet nowhere is the argument advanced that biography is the only way to enter upon history in order to grasp the significance of the past as we live in the present and prepare for the future. Rather, it merely insists that causes, -isms, environment, geography, or other impersonal reference points do not tell the whole story, or anything close to the whole story. Biography personalizes the past, an essential path to follow as we attempt to understand our inheritance. David H. Burton is professor emeritus of history at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. He is the General Editor of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft. His American History-British Historians (1976) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and The Learned Presidency was selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic books of 1988.