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    1. As a ‘form of inquiry’, Samuel wrote in the LRB of 14 June 1990, history is a ‘journey into the unknown’.
    2. Samuel joined the party as soon as he was old enough, but left as part of the mass exodus prompted by Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.
    3. Despite – or perhaps because of – all this activity, Samuel only published one sole-authored book in his lifetime, Theatres of Memory (1994), an account of the popular historical imagination in late 20th-century Britain told via case studies, from Laura Ashley fabrics to the touristification of Ironbridge. Since his death from cancer in 1996, however, Samuel has been prolific. A second volume of Theatres of Memory, titled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, came out in 1998, followed in 2006 by The Lost World of British Communism, a volume of essays combining research and recollections.

      Theatres of Memory (1994) sounds like it's taking lots of examples from a zettelkasten and tying them together.

      It's also interesting to note that he published several books posthumously. Was this accomplished in part due to his zettelkasten notes the way others like Ludwig Wittgenstein?

    4. In 1967, Samuel founded the History Workshop movement to democratise ‘the act of historical production, enlarging the constituency of historical writers, and bringing the experience of the present to bear upon the interpretation of the past’; it held huge, radical and ecumenical events, published pamphlets and books, and in 1976 founded its own journal, still running today.
    5. Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and subheaded under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned and surprising connections thereby generated ... All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.

      brief outline of Raphael Samuel's note taking tools and some scant description of the method.

      I love the phrase "scholarly prestiditation" to describe the "magic of note taking" along with the idea of combinatorial creativity.

      Presumably the quote comes from the Samuel piece quoted in the article.

    6. Raphael Samuel​ adopted his notetaking method from Beatrice and Sidney Webb

      Historian Raphael Samuel used a zettelkasten-like note taking method which he adopted from Beatrice and Sidney Webb.

  2. Oct 2023
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  5. Feb 2020
    1. Image Credit: Detail from "The School of Athens" by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (c. 1509–1511).

      Euclid's common notions appear to be grounds for many of Marx's arguments in Ch. 1, but also throughout the book.

      Near the beginning of Ch. 1 of the Elements Euclid lists them [PDF]:

      • Things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another (the Transitive property of a Euclidean relation).
      • If equals are added to equals, then the wholes are equal (Addition property of equality).
      • If equals are subtracted from equals, then the differences are equal (Subtraction property of equality).
      • Things that coincide with one another are equal to one another (Reflexive property).
      • The whole is greater than the part.

      Regarding the fifth, also see Aristotle, Metaphysics 8.6 [=1045a]; Topics 6.13 (=150a15-16);

      On the concept of the "whole-before-the-parts" (along with the "whole of the parts" and the "whole in the part"), also see Proclus, El. Theol., prop. 67.