Robert A. Rosenstone

Robert A. Rosenstone is a Professor of History (now emeritus) at the California Institute of Technology. He has written two books on the topic of film as history: Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Harvard, 1995) and History on Film / Film on History (Pearson, 2006). Earlier in his career he published two works on social, artistic, and political radicalism: Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (Pegasus, 1969) and Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (Knopf, 1975), on which Warren Beatty based his film Reds. He also produced an innovative narrative about Americans who lived and worked in 19th-century Japan, entitled Mirror in the Shrine (Harvard, 1988). Rosenstone is also the author of several works of fiction, including a book of stories, The Man Who Swam into History: The (Mostly) True Story of my Jewish Family (Texas, 2002), a historical novel based on the life of Russian writer Isaac Babel, King of Odessa (Northwestern, 2003), and a novel set in contemporary Spain, Red Star, Crescent Moon: A Muslim-Jewish Love Story (Scarith Press, 2008). His memoir, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian: Living and Writing the Past, appeared from Bloomsbury Academic in 2016.