Welcome to Dave Garrow’s web page. I was a bit tardy to appreciate the utility of putting all my non-book publications up on the web at one comprehensive site, but once I forced myself to gather full-text copies of all my various articles and reviews, convert them to PDFs (if they weren’t already), and attach the appropriate links, I realized–way later than many people–that web-posting was a far better endeavor than collecting hard copies and ‘tear sheets’ in various file drawers!

In years past hardly a month went by without some student or colleague asking me for a copy of something I’d written years ago that they weren’t immediately able to put their hands on. Sometimes I was able to send a PDF attachment, but on other occasions I was reduced to using good old-fashioned snail mail.

So this is the solution. I’ve organized all of my past publications, from 1978 to the present, in two comprehensive menus: one chronological, by year of publication, and the other topical, with straightforward subject categories. In 2010 I scanned in several dozen book chapters and biographical dictionary entries written in years past, so now this site is 100% complete, excluding only items that have been directly reprinted from one or another of my books. From 2010 through early 2017 I was 99% focused upon a huge book project, and so there were fewer review essays and law review articles than in previous years, but in May 2017 HarperCollins published Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, which I began work on back in early 2008. The paperback edition appeared in May 2018, and in March 2020 The Critic published my article reporting on how the newly-available original typescript of Barack’s Dreams From My Father differs in significant particulars from the book as published. In June 2019, Standpoint magazine in the UK published my notable update article on the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the Links section here are web-links to the dozen best-informed and most thoughtful commentaries on that article. In August 2023 Tablet magazine published David Samuels’ very lengthy interview profile of me–“The Obama Factor”–focusing on Rising Star but also covering really the entire arc of my career from my earliest MLK research up through the present.

I recently discovered that C-Span offers a comprehensive video collection of all of my taped appearances on their shows over the years, reaching from 1986 up through Brian Lamb’s superb two-part program with me on Rising Star in 2017, and all of those links are viewable here: https://www.c-span.org/person/?davidgarrow

         2022 got off to a tardy start, as on February 20 I suffered a moderately severe stroke, and then on March 15 underwent emergency major brain surgery for a sizeable chronic subdural hematoma. That was 100% successful, and I was discharged after just 60 hours in the ICU and have been feeling mostly fine skull-wise ever since, and the CT scans of my brain have now tapered off.

Please browse and enjoy, and don’t hesitate to tell me–david dot garrow @ cantab dot net–if there’s something you believe can be improved!

                                           Sincerely,

                                           Dave Garrow