There are a thousand insidious ways in which you can come to identify with the object of study. … It’s reassuring, because identifying with something, no matter how it happens, offers a kind of relief. But it’s dangerous because this mirroring of the self stunts the imagination, inhibits the mind and stifles curiosity by confining […]
In a recent NY Times opinion piece Hallie Lieberman laments the persistence, prevalence, and perniciousness of a particular historical myth, i.e., the story of the invention of the vibrator as told in The Technology of Orgasm. The standard story is, according to Lieberman: A mutton-chopped, bow-tie-clad doctor stands in an operating theater, where the silhouette […]
…history remains first and foremost an encounter with death. A. Farge, The Allure of the Archive, 8
I am reminded of how much the setting for my archival research has become entwined with the discoveries I made at its tables. N. Zemon Davis, “Forward,” The Allure of the Archive (Yale, 2013), xiii.
Modern man has formed a curiously distorted picture of himself, by interpreting his early history in terms of his present interests in making machines and conquering nature. And then in turn he has justified his present concerns by calling his prehistoric self a tool-making animal, and assuming that the material instruments of production dominate all […]
Historiann recently reflected on the preponderance of best-selling history books written by men and about men: last year 21 of the 23 best-selling history books were written by men. As she pointed out, audiences never seem to tire of biographies recounting the heroic man who has somehow contributed to our modern world. While she focused […]
After reading the interview with Edward Shorter, “How Depression Went Mainstream,” I posted some critical thoughts about his dismissal of contemporary history of science. His point seemed to be that present history of science was boring because most contemporary historians of science do not have the technical training to understand the science. As John Wilkins […]
The opinions Edward Shorter expressed recently in an interview seem at odds to his earlier work, at least according to people familiar with his previous books. Shorter now dismisses most history of science and medicine as uninteresting because it doesn’t study “science.” His objection raises once again the internalist/externalist debate and to reflect the different […]
In a recently published interview, How Depression Went Mainstream over at The History News Network, historian of medicine Edward Shorter talks about his newest book, criticizes historians of science, and bemoans trends in the history of science.[1] Shorter is an accomplished historian of medicine. He graduated from Harvard in 1968 and has spent the bulk […]
As true today as it was 50 years ago: But both the scholastic and the humanist reformers applied the same activist formula to history, taking an attitude to the past determined by the needs and aspirations of the present and providing a programme for future action. Such an attitude seems to be a deeply persistent […]