Obama and America

Professor Simon Schama, born in London to second generation immigrant Jewish parents, has written and presented more than 30 documentaries on art and history for the BBC. His 15-part BBC series A History of Britain (2000-2002), won numerous awards.

Other TV credits include the BBC’s Emmy-winning eight-part Power of Art, the BBC film Rough Crossings (2007); Murder at Harvard (2003 – based on his novella Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculation); Landscape and Memory (5-part 1995 BBC2 series); and a film on Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

In his most recent 4-part BBC series The American Future: A History – made in the run-up to the 2008 US Presidential election – Schama looked at how conflicts in the past resonate in political life today. Simon Schama has been an essayist and critic for The New Yorker since 1994 winning the National Magazine Award (1996).

He has written 14 books, translated into 16 languages from China to Brazil, including Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands (1978) winning the Wolfson Prize for History; Two Rothschilds and The Land of Israel (1979); The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in The Golden Age (1987); Citizens: A Chronicle of The French Revolution (1989) – winning the 1990 NCR Book Award; Landscape and Memory (1995); Rembrandt’s Eyes (1999); a three volume History of Britain, (2000-2002); Hang-Ups: Essays on Painting (Mostly) (2004); Rough Crossings: Britain, The Slaves and The American Revolution (2005) – given the USA National Book Critics Circle Prize for non-fiction; The Power of Art (2006); and The American Future: A History (2008).

“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness, however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.” – Simon Schama “Afterword”, Dead Certainties