Richard Rabinowitz, a noted historian and museum curator, is the president of American History Workshop. For decades, he has been instrumental in developing new museums and creating lively exhibitions across the nation, including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the New-York Historical Society. He is the author of The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England and Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award for distinguished contributions to public history.

Could the flood of memories that for Proust became Remembrance of Things Past have been stirred not by the taste of a tea-soaked petite madeleine—but instead, as in historian Richard Rabinowitz’s deeply moving family memoir, Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story, by the accidental discovery of a nearly century-old wooden-handled bottle opener?…His tenderly detailed evocation of times that are no more remind us that we, too, have the tools to pry open the past and revive what we thought we had forgotten.

Richard Rabinowitz, a noted historian and museum curator, is the president of American History Workshop. For decades, he has been instrumental in developing new museums and creating lively exhibitions across the nation, including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the New-York Historical Society. He is the author of The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England and Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award for distinguished contributions to public history.

Could the flood of memories that for Proust became Remembrance of Things Past have been stirred not by the taste of a tea-soaked petite madeleine—but instead, as in historian Richard Rabinowitz’s deeply moving family memoir, Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story, by the accidental discovery of a nearly century-old wooden-handled bottle opener?…His tenderly detailed evocation of times that are no more remind us that we, too, have the tools to pry open the past and revive what we thought we had forgotten.

Richard Rabinowitz, a noted historian and museum curator, is the president of American History Workshop. For decades, he has been instrumental in developing new museums and creating lively exhibitions across the nation, including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the New-York Historical Society. He is the author of The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England and Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award for distinguished contributions to public history.

Could the flood of memories that for Proust became Remembrance of Things Past have been stirred not by the taste of a tea-soaked petite madeleine—but instead, as in historian Richard Rabinowitz’s deeply moving family memoir, Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story, by the accidental discovery of a nearly century-old wooden-handled bottle opener?…His tenderly detailed evocation of times that are no more remind us that we, too, have the tools to pry open the past and revive what we thought we had forgotten.