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Empire Podcast: Lenin and The Rise of the Bolsheviks

ᔥu/atomicnotes in Who uses a card index? Top historians, that's who at r/Zettelkasten

At the start of a recent episode of the Empire Podcast (the one on the Bolshevik Revolution), historian William Dalrymple reveals that when he began to write his first history book, The White Moghul, he had no idea how to do it, so he called the eminent historian Antony Bevor, who invited him round for a lesson in using his own method - a card index. Dalrymple says he's been using a card index ever since.

Then the podcast co-host, Anita Anand says she learned this approach from William and she too has been using it ever since.

By my rough calculation, the card index lesson would have taken place about 1998-2000, so Antony Bevor probably used index cards to write his great books on Crete in WW2 and on the Battle of Stalingrad, among many others.

So that's three highly successful popular historians using a card index to research and write significant and best-selling non-fiction books.

reply to u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1843k2w/who_uses_a_card_index_top_historians_thats_who/

Nice finds u/atomicnotes.

We can add them to the list of other known historians who used zettelkasten including: - Barbara Tuchman - Victor Margolin - S.D. Goitein - Gotthard Deutsch - Jacques Barzun - Henry F. Graff - Keith Thomas - Jacques Goutor - Umberto Eco - Frederic L. Paxson - Earle W. Dow - Aby Warburg - Frederick Jackson Turner - Theodor Mommsen - Charles Victor Langlois - Charles Seignobos - Ernst Bernheim*

Certainly there are several hundreds (thousands?) I've missed. Those marked with a (*) have written texts covering note taking or historical method.

Barbara Tuchman took her notes on four-by-six inch index cards.

She repeated the oft-advised mantra to only write on one side of a sheet.

What manual did she read this in? She specifically puts quotes on "Never write on the back of anything." so perhaps it might be something that could be tracked down?

Who was the earliest version of this quote? And was it always towards the idea of cutting up slips or pages and not wanting to lose material on the back? or did it also (later? when?) include ease-of-use and user interface features even when not cutting things up?

At what point did double sided become a thing for personal printed materials? Certainly out of a duty to minimize materials, but it also needed the ability to duplex print pages or photocopy them that way.

reply to @DrMaddy101 and jsnyrty3917 at #

I would recommend caution here as Scheper approaches the subject like a cult, which it patently is not. He also has the tendency to gatekeep, gaslight others, and create a toxic environment. He's selling you something, and he's being rude about it at the same time. Even though he attempts to maintain something closely akin to Luhmann's practice, his poorly edited book distinctly suggests some very non-Luhmann-esque practices. The zettelkasten tradition is much richer and deeper than the surface level discussion of Luhmann. Using him as your only model is perforce going to be tremendously limiting. You'll find additional excellent (and even some more productive) examplars hiding in the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, Philip Melancthon, Konrad Gessner, John Locke, Carl Linnaeus, Thomas Harrison, Vincentius Placcius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, S. D. Goitein, Gotthard Deutsch, Beatrice Webb, Sir James Murray, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mortimer J. Adler, Niklas Luhmann, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Jacques Barzun, Vladimir Nabokov, George Carlin, Twyla Tharp, Gertrud Bauer, and even Eminem. We really need to put an end to the "Cult of Luhmann" philosophy which is going around.