How the Christmas tree tradition came to be
Evergreens have long served as symbols of the perseverance of life during the bleakness of winter, and the promise of the sun’s return.
Troy Bickham
Professor of History, Texas A&M University
Troy Bickham is a Professor of History and Director of the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. Having joined Texas A&M in 2003, he served in various roles at the university’s campus in Qatar from 2009-19, before returning to the Department of History. He teaches broadly in the histories of Britain and its empire, the Atlantic world, and British colonial North America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early-nineteenth centuries. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
He is the author of four books: Savages within the Empire (2005), which explores how encounters with Native Americans affected British culture in the eighteenth century; Making Headlines (2008), which examines British engagement with the American Revolution via the British newspaper press; and The Weight of Vengeance (2012), which is a transatlantic study of the Anglo-American War of 1812. His most recent book, Eating the Empire (2020), investigates how food from around the world shaped British culture in the eighteenth century. He is currently working on a project that maps the movement of news in early modern Britain and its empire.
