In the introduction to his new book, In the Past Lane, Michael Kammen, the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture at Cornell University, tells the story of a chair. "In 1928 two artisans were asked to repair the official yet well-used president's chair at Cornell University. In the small circular space behind a medallion displaying the carved bust of Ezra Cornell (located at the top of the chair, on the back), they discovered a closely folded slip of paper wrapped in tinfoil and tied with coarse thread. Translated from German, a single didactic sentence, written in script in 1868 when Cornell opened its doors to students, declared: 'Go out into the world and testify to what is born, even in prison walls, from strength, from patience, and from loving toil.' The chair had been built on commission in a Prussian jail."

In the Past Lane (Oxford University Press, 1997) brings together writings from more than a decade, covering the broad spectrum of Kammen's recent interests, including the social role of the historian, the relationship between culture and the State, uses of tradition in American commercial culture, American historical art, memory distortion in American history and the contested uses of history in American education.

"The writing of history," Kammen notes, "has often come from the combined circumstances of confinement, patience and compulsive affection for the historian's vocation." Sir Walter Raleigh, Napoleon and William Smith Jr., the last chief justice of colonial New York, all wrote history while under arrest.

In "Personal Identity and the Historian's Vocation," the first of nine essays that comprise In the Past Lane, Kammen explores the ways that the personal identities and experience of historians may help color or shape the way history is written.

He tells the story of the historian Fawn Brodie, who was raised a Mormon, and who wrote a biography of Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History. Brodie was drawn to the subject in part, no doubt, because of her background, and Kammen quotes Brodie writing to her parents: "You brought us all up to revere the truth, which is the noblest ideal a parent can instill in his children." But Brodie was excommunicated from the Mormon Church for apostasy, perhaps for bringing a historian's -- rather than a Mormon's -- eye to her subject.

Kammen considers the complex interplay between historians' personal lives -- their religion, ideology, race, gender, sexual orientation -- and the history they write. Drawing on prominent historians' self-reflection, in letters and memoirs, Kammen takes the reader inside the process of doing history and traces the movement away from the delusions of objectivity to a more engaged and personal approach to the past.

In "Culture and the State in America," Kammen examines the politically-charged issue of government funding for the arts and concludes, "Cultural federalism -- government support for cultural needs along with collaboration at all levels -- could go a long way toward minimizing anti-intellectualism, fear of innovation and mistrust of constructive cultural criticism."

Kammen's interest ranges from an examination of the meaning of the architecture of American courthouses, the creation of "temples of justice," to the use of George and Martha Washington in an advertisement for stove polish. "The image and name of our first president," Kammen writes, "came to be exploited in the sale of ice cream, canned vegetables and steam radiators."

"Michael Kammen has distinguished himself time after time," says David McCullough, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning biographyTruman, "as teacher, historian, writer, master observer of culture and human nature. In print, as in person, he is ever wise, lively, provocative, clear-thinking and fair-minded."

Kammen came to Cornell in 1965, and has written more than a dozen books, including Mystic Chords of Memory and Meadows of Memory. He won the Pulitzer Prize for People of Paradox, in 1973, and the Francis Parkman Prize for A Machine That Would Go of Itself, in 1987. Kammen has held fellowships at Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities, as well as at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian Institution. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from George Washington University in 1991.

In the Past Lane shows Kammen moving easily from the substantive to the wry. He quotes the historian Lewis Mumford at Christmas, "using the season of peace and cheer and goodwill to begin a murderous attack upon Mr. Bernard DeVoto," and tells of the distinguished American historian Allan Nevis recommending his multi-volume Civil War history, The Ordeal of the Union, as a wedding present.