The book's famous central metaphor is the Panopticon, the prison architecture developed by the eighteenth-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

The reports of the Co-operative Congresses held in Birmingham, Londonand various venues in Lancashire and Yorkshire between 1831 and 1835present a kaleidoscopic picture of co-operative activity during these years.Some stores had limited aims and shared their profits on consumer goodsamong their members. Some looked forward to settling their members in acommunity. Some sought through-the labour exchanges a practical expres-sion of anti-capitalist economics based on giving labour its full value. Asever, the ambiguities in Owen's position meant that he was both accepted bymost co-operators with respect and at the same time ignored in some of hismost cherished projects.

When Owen returned to England from New Harmony in 1828, he tried toreorganise the co-operators on principles more in accordance with his own. Hehad little patience with their small schemes

In 1829 there were some 125 co-operative tradingassociations in Britain; four years later there were over 400.

plan for a co-operative store was developed around the same time in Brightonby William Bryan and Dr William King, whose paper, the Co-operator

The creation of an 'Owenism' separate from Owen himself can be datedfrom 1821 when a group of London artisans set up the Co-operative andEconomical Society to start communal living in Spa Fields, Clerkenwell. Theleader of the Spa Fields co-operators, George Mudie, coined the word'Owenism' and began to develop Owen's ideas into an alternative politicaleconomy based on labour value and the natural market for goods.

New Lanark was a seriously mis-leading model for Owen to base his schemes on. While his managerial skillsthere were indeed considerable, Southey was rigpt that they were appropri-ate only to the New Lanark situation, and Owen's financial experience atNew Lanark was dangerously inadequate for any future experiment whichdid not have the economic advantages of the cotton industry at the beginningof the nineteenth century. Owen's reputation was built on more flimsygrounds than was realised at the time.

John MinterMorgan picked up Owen's ideas in 1817 but differed from him in believingthat communitarianism was compatible with Christianity, a fact notoriouslydenounced by Owen in his Second Address at the London Tavern meeting on21 August 1817. Morgan's Inquiry Respecting Private Property and theAuthority and Perpetuity of the Apostolic Institution of a Community ofGoods (1827) drew for its inspiration on the Spenceans, Shakers

Moravians (The Church of theUnited Brethren). These were important because, unlike many of the reli-gious sects, they combined the ideal of community living with the planting ofchurches in the community and a missionary impulse to spread their gospelacross the world. In these respects they provide a better parallel to the formthat Owenism was to take than the Shakers and others who more directlyinfluenced Owen. In their settlements at Fulneck, between Bradford andLeeds (1744 ), and Fairfield, between Ashton and Manchester (1779), as wellas several others which did not last, they set an example to men as diverse asThomas Evans, the Spencean Philanthropist, and John Minter Morgan, theChurch of England disciple of Owen.

One ofthe most influential and successful sects to make the trans-Atlantic journeywere the Shakers, a sect formed around 'Mother' Ann Lee in Lancashire inthe early 1770s and which emigrated to America in 1774. 28 Their communi-ties in the New World were recorded by W. S. Warder, a PhiladelphianQuaker whose account was published by Robert Owen in 1817.

Community was an ambiguous concept because it could mean on the onehand a state of mind and a set of relationships within existing society, and onthe other the creation of a new society, located outside present experience.Both ideas are to be found in the romantic poet and social critic, SamuelTaylor Coleridge. As a young man Coleridge discussed with Southey andothers forming a 'Pantisocracy' on the Susquehanna river in Pennsylvania.

In 1839, one of theforemost social critics of this new society, Thomas Carlyle, condemned theway in which cash payment had become 'the universal sole nexus of man toman' and a few years later Disraeli constructed the plot of Sybil around hiscelebrated division of society into two nations - the rich and the poor.

London was the centre of the handicraft trades. In 1800 it was, with apopulation of over a million, by far the largest city in Europe and was tomore than double in size during the next half century. Its outer parishes, suchas Marylebone and Lambeth, were in themselves the size of large Europeancities.

Between 179 3 and 1820 the amount of land enclosed by act of Parliamentmore than doubled and over a million acres of common and waste land waslost together with over two million acres of open fields. The main parts of thecountry affected were the north and, to a lesser extent, a string of southerncounties from Surrey through Hampshire and Dorset to Somerset. About athird of the great tithe - on major crops such as corn and wood - was in thehands of often wealthy lay impropriators, while the attempts of the clergy tocollect their small tithes - typically on products of the cottage economy suchas garden vegetables, pigs and potatoes - caused great resentment against thechurch. The game laws, with their prohibition on tenants and labourerskilling game for their own use or to protect their crops, and the draconianpunishment of those caught in breach of the law, more than any other legisla-tion stamped the divisions of class conflict across rural England. Nothingcould more symbolise the fact that the land did not belong to the people thanthe image of the poor labourer, taxed on the meagre products of his garden,deprived of access to common land, and forced through hunger to take ille-gal game, thereby risking a maiming by man-traps if caught by the leg ortransportation if caught by the law.

The man who brought together and popularised most vividly these strandsin romantic conservative thinking about the countryside was WilliamCobbett. Unlike Paine and Spence he was no theorist. His articles on thecountryside which appeared in his Political Register in the 1820s, partlyreprinted as Rural Rides in 1830, were based on experience. Rural Rides wasconfined largely to the south of England, which Cobbett knew best, and hisconcern was to deplore and, by implication, reverse the process of decay inthe countryside. His assumptions were those of the farmer. He did not chal-lenge the rights of good landlords, and felt for the plight of the agriculturallabourer with the passionate paternalism of a benevolent superior. Hisenemy was the town and the intrusion of artificial urban philosophies andinterests into the natural countryside.

Of the many writers who developed and relayed these ideas of agrarianradicalism to men and women responsive to communitarian thought in thenineteenth century, two were particularly important: Thomas Spence(1750-1814) and Thomas Paine (1737-1809). For long the more neglectedand yet the more influential of the two, Spence popularised a view of societynot unlike that envisaged by Harrington. His natural community was theparish, within which all land should be held in common.

UnfortunatelyOwen was to find that in Britain too, even devoted Owenites had their owndemocratic and egalitarian ideas and perceptions of what his theory oughtto mean for them.

Not only were the members not ready; neither was Owen. All his effortshitherto had been aimed at the higher classes, to persuade them to adopt hisnew view in order to benefit the people. The latter were seen as the objectsnot the subjects of his attention; they were the 'human machines' of NewLanark, not people with their own ideas and perceptions of what his messagemight mean for them and with whom he would have to work. In his firstaddress at New Harmony, he had warned his hearers that 'as no other indi-vidual has had the same experience as myself in the practise of the systemabout to be introduced, I must for some time partially take the lead in itsdirection' 97 Yet seven months later he seemed to think them ready even whenhe appeared unclear in his own mind what the 'equality' was that he wasoffering them.

Owen was convinced not only that he had a uniqueunderstanding of how to create a better society, based on commercial andmanufacturing wealth but resulting in greater happiness for all, but also thatsinister forces were at work to conceal the obvious truth revealed in his mes-sage.

Owen seems never to have realised the point of Southey's criticism, whichwas not that he had failed at New Lanark, but that he had succeeded for rea-sons which could not be replicated in the wider world.

At adinner party in January 1813 given by Daniel Stuart, owner of the Couriernewspaper, he met William Godwin, who took him along to meet FrancisPlace, who in turn introduced him to Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Thisreinforces the inference that Godwin's ideas were important in shaping thephilosophy of the Essays.What Owen did not admit in his autobiography was that the four Essays -printed together as A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of theFormation of the Human Character, and the Application of the Principle toPractice 'by One of His Majesty's Justices of the Peace for the County ofLanark' in 1813 - were actually prepared for publication by Francis Placeand James Mill. They not only improved Owen's prolix prose but also omit-ted passages of an anti-democratic nature, which Owen restored to the sec-ond edition of 1816.

Maclure was eventuallypersuaded to lease 900 acres in the centre of Harmony for $50,000 (just over£10,000) on which to develop his own educational experiments. Little wasdone to make the community produce more than it consumed, though, andby 1828 the financial problems of New Harmony had become insurmount-able

So, was Owen a competent financier; and was he an honest man? JohnQuincy Adams thought him 'crafty crazy'. 48 At both New Lanark and NewHarmony he was good at keeping a minute, even miserly, check on individ-ual details of expenditure but when dealing with large sums he adopted thereckless confidence of the speculator

Humphreys had to take Owen to court to secure thereturn of his money. Owen's autobiography tells a rather different story, nodoubt one which Owen believed by the time he came to write it down. 40 AsJohn Butt mildly concludes, 'this episode certainly indicates his capacity forruthlessness and self delusion'.

The profit from the store went to pay for the infant school. This too wasbenevolent self-interest. With labour in short supply, especially after the deci-sion to eliminate pauper child labour, Owen needed the labour of womenand so the provision of child care from the age of two was a necessary pieceof enlightened management, especially as parents had to contribute three-pence to the school out of their monthly wages. Education was subsidisedand compulsory but not free.

Owen's discipline was resented by the work people. As he himself appreci-ated, he was a hard taskmaster and an outsider, who did not really begin towin them over until, like Dale in 1788, he kept the workers on when therewas no work for them during the crisis caused by the American embargo oncotton exports during 1807. 28His philanthropy was well measured, as is illustrated by his two majorsocial innovations, the store and the school. By establishing his own store inthe village, purchasing goods wholesale and undercutting other local retail-ers, he was able to cut the cost of living by some 25 per cent and generate aprofit of around £700 a year. This had the effect of increasing real wageswhilst not inflating the actual wages bill.

Owen had thus joined in Manchester in the 1790s a group of Lancashiredoctors, scientists and literary men (the categories were not mutually exclu-sive) who were concerned about the conditions of factory child labour.Through James Currie of Liverpool and the inquiry of 1796 they had linkswith David Dale, the Scottish philanthropist, banker, merchant, religiousleader and proprietor of the New Lanark manufactory with its attached vil-lage of approaching 2,000 inhabitants, a quarter of whom were pauper chil-dren directly under his care. Owen's move to New Lanark can therefore beseen as an extension both of his Manchester experience with Perceival and ofDale's welfare schemes as discussed with Currie and reported to theManchester men in 1796. Indeed, this association between Owen, factoryreform and Dale may explain why the latter was prepared to sell his mills toOwen's partnership in 1800 on preferential terms, and indeed to acceptOwen as a suitable husband for his daughter Caroline.

Fallsof Clyde were a tourist attraction, well-known among late eighteenth-cen-tury romantics, and when Dale took Richard Arkwright to see the falls in1784 the English entrepreneur was immediately struck by the suitability ofthe site for a cotton factory, soon to be the largest of its kind in Scotland. Thefirst mill was built in 1785, the year that Arkwright lost his monopolypatents over spinning machinery and Dale could afford to dispense with hispartnership, and production began the following year.

David Dale tothe Falls of Clyde at Lanark, twenty-four miles from Glasgow and thirtymiles from Edinburgh.

The menwho dominated the Literary and Philosophical Society, as well as ManchesterCollege, were Unitarians of the school of Joseph Priestley and it is likelytherefore that among the ideas discussed would have been Priestley's materi-alism, necessitarianism and utilitarianism,

in his early teens, he became interested in comparative religion and, ifhis later recollections contain anything of the truth, he started to see religionas a cultural construct, lacking any permanent validity.

Owen's ideas were developed during his early years, perhaps even beforehe came to New Lanark at the beginning of 1800, but it was his experience atNew Lanark that convinced him he had a message for the world. When hefirst published these views in A New View· of Society (1813 ), he was alreadyover forty and an apparently successful businessman in charge of one of theleading cotton-spinning establishments in the country.

Owen himself was, paradoxically, more conservative than theviews he developed, and though his radical views have become of fashion-able interest among historians, I think it a mistake to read them apart fromthe man.

Owen never outgrew his New Lanarkexperience.

Association of All Classes of All Nations,founded by Owen in 1835

Robert Owen, wise and good,Better known than understood;Too often putting wisdom's toolsIn the very hands of fools.

George Jacob Holyoake, the founder of the British Secular Movement, and, in the earliest years of the enterprise, the most conspicuous figure among the Secularists. A frail little man with weak eyes and a thin voice, Holyoake was nevertheless by nature a crusader. Yet, in his crusading efforts he ordinarily manifested pronounced courtesy and restraint towards opponents of his aims. In fact, his manner of dealing with persons in the opposite camp was so agreeable that they themselves often referred to it as praiseworthy. On the other hand, Holyoake was sharply critical of most of the Secular leaders, and at times even tended to side with “the enemy” against them. Especially was this the case after he ceased to be the controlling influence in the Secular Movement.

Government was really an affair of, by, and for the higher classes.

Except for a few of the leaders, who, because of being, say, journalists or small shopkeepers, belonged to the lower middle class, the Secularists were virtually all members of the workings, classes; and the Secular Movement was undertaken to bring to an end a set of conditions which from the working class point of view was provokingly unsatisfactory.

Thomas Hollis, JohnWilkes, Major John Cartwright and Granville Sharp; the Dissentingministers Richard Price and Joseph Priestley

sections themselves cannot be marked free or paid as a whole

Foundation’s concerns would be with adult education, not with col-lege credit, degree-seekers, or the formal education establishment as such.

A democratic culture did not mean homogeneity necessarily, nor conformity.

Time’s exuberant review

criticized John Dewey and defended the idea of “unchanging funda-mentals.”

Their experience at the Institute’s School caused them to believe in the accessibility of great books among unschooled but enthusiastic readers. The experiment with ethnically diverse working-class New Yorkers seeded a move-ment based on fostering a more unified, shared, and democratic life of thought.

education’s task is to “reorient the individual, to enable him to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, to place him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals.”

it was Adler’s experience at the People’s Institute that instigated and reinforced his—and his friends’—belief that great books could be accessible to all readers. Formed during the Progressive Era, in 1897, by Columbia University professor Charles Sprague Smith, it was an offshoot of the Cooper Union mechanics school.

a vision of democratized culture that consisted of challenging oneself with reading and thinking about great books.

a performance and a lesson in critical thinking.

Erskine bridged Victorian and modern American conceptions of great books, even while he embodied a paradox of the era’s American intel-lectual elites, namely, an ability to uphold elitist thinking (i.e., fear of vulgarization) while possessing democratic intentions and valuing access. Erskine was a paragon of that “duality.” He was willing to see great texts in the hands of the middle classes and as mass culture products.

middle-class culture of earnest aspiration in the 1950s, the product of a strange alliance of the democratic (culture for everyone) and the elitist (culture can make you better than other people).

Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald, as well as members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists, argued the following: although “mass produced” can sometimes mean widely accessible and therefore equal opportunity in mass culture, reproduction could also mean something banal, conformist (i.e., falsely standardized), and degraded —“kitsch” and “ersatz cul-ture”

fostering a “public philosophy” in the face of extreme ideology.

creation of agents who could help select books for the overwhelmed

did not often write about the messiness of the democratic process. That lacuna would leave them unprepared for the cultural politics of the Culture Wars.

many great books promoters wrote about a larger, more inclusive and worldly cosmopolitanism based on normative, universal goods and a global sense of the common good.

What of the “democratic” portion of democratic culture? Thatmodifier stresses the relationship of US culture to its particular politi-cal system, ideologies, and rights. Herein is a concern for democracyin relation to what Jürgen Habermas called the “unfinished proj-ect” of modernity.15 Fostered by liberal democracies and constitu-tional republics in the modern West, democratic culture enables theunderstanding, access, and distribution of civil and human rights.

the steady accu-mulation of individual intellectual progress obtained by studying greatbooks (not to exclude other means) would create empowered, cosmo-politan citizens comfortable with freedom in a century plagued withtotalitarianism.

thoughtful historians seize momentsof disjunction, irony, and paradox as opportunities that promise aninteresting story.

Adler believed that a liberal education obtained throughgreat books, organized through Britannica’s set as a study of the his-tory of Western ideas, would remedy a widespread American anti-intellectualism that grew out of an excessive educational focus on jobstraining, or vocationalism.

To great books’ opponents the past representedby those works is a threatening foreign country filled with burdensand backward thinking.

As Umberto Ecorelates, lists “create order” and “make infinity comprehensible”

What is the differ-ence between “great books” (or “the great books”) and “the canon”?The phrase emerged in the English-speaking world, around the1880s, to describe a limited set of books that represented the best everwritten—that is, excellence in book form

The rate at which people with history PhDs find tenure-track employment within four years of graduation has declined dramatically, from 54 percent for the 2013 PhD cohort to just 27 percent for the 2017 cohort. In 2022, only a miserable 10 percent of the 2019 and 2020 cohorts were employed as full-time faculty members.

a congruent sense ofthe piety of the adherents of this largest of the world’s religions, which made the centuries of conficts among those holding different Christian theological views unfathomable.

a historian who was also interested in getting the actual words of people who witnessed history into the hands of readers

One of the knocks against the Great Books is that they are the records of the winners. These are books that people in power, with lots of resources, chose to propagate and preserve. And since they tend to represent the only remaining record of certain eras, reading the Great Books gives a distorted view of human history, thought, and behavior.This is in contrast to our own time, when we have access to a much wider range of thought, representing many different points of view.

I wasthus in a good position for finding out by practice the modeof putting a thought which gives it easiest admittance intominds not prepared for it by habit; while I became practi-cally conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of men,the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing thenon-essential to preserve the essential. I learnt how to ob-tain the best I could, when I could not obtain everything

This preparationof abstracts, subject to my father's censorship, was of greatservice to me, by compelling precision

I rejoicein the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system ofteaching, which, however, did succeed in enforcing habitsof application; but the new, as it seems to me, is trainingup a race of men who will be incapable of doing anythingwhich is disagreeable to them.

the forbearance which flowsfrom a conscientious sense of the importance to mankind ofthe equal freedom of all opinions, is the only tolerancewhich is commendable, or, to the highest moral order ofminds, possible.

The liberality of the age, or in other words theweakening of the obstinate prejudice which makes menunable to see what is before their eyes because it is con-trary to their expectations,

synoptic tables.

I, however, derived from this dis-cipline the great advantage, of learning more thoroughlyand retaining more lastingly the things which I was setto teach

he required me afterwards to restate to him in myown words.

I madenotes on slips of paper while reading, and from these inthe morning walks, I told the gtor^ to him

In 1939, at a time of extreme danger for Britain, this episode exposed risks to the nation’s security as its central bank governor used his independence to transfer $6 million to its enemy - the Nazi regime. Throughout the controversy, Norman held the line. He claimed that the BIS was a completely nonpolitical institution that had never even been required to tell the government about its role in the German looting of Czechoslovak gold in the first place.

Even if life were intolerably bleak and empty – it isn’t, but even if it were – how could you, how could anyone, twist a need for solace into a belief in scriptural truth claims about the universe, simply because they make you feel good? Intelligent people don’t believe something because it comforts them. They believe it because, and only because, they have seen evidence that supports it.

Strabo wrote that, before its fall, Carthage had 700,000 inhabitants and led an alliance of 300 cities (both almost certainly only small exaggerations) while Polybius called it the “wealthiest city in the world.”

Solitary study occupied four of the six days of the standard academic week at Wilhelmstein. In particular, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays were set aside for meetings with tutors and the completion of projects assigned by tutors. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, students gathered in the library of the fortress, where they divided their time between group classes and self-directed study.

Another friend and a contemporary of Darwin, The Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle, also wrote positively about Darwin’s note-taking method. In his book “La Phytographie: Or, The Art Of Describing Plants Considered From Different Points Of View”, de Candolle discussed the benefits of using slips of paper to record observations, a practice that he and his father had used in their own work. He noted that Darwin had independently developed the same method, and that he was “more impressed with it than ever”.Here is an excerpt from de Candolle’s book (translated from the French):“Mr. Darwin, whom I had the pleasure of seeing, used for his notes exactly the same method of loose slips that my father and I have followed, and which I have described in detail in my Phytographie. Eighty years of our experience have demonstrated to me its value. I am more impressed with it than ever, since Darwin devised it on his own. This method gives the work more accuracy, supplements memory, and saves years.”

some historians contended to me that the scholarly world is functioning just fine, but did grant that there may be problems in so-called popular history — that is, history not done by professional historians, and for wider audiences. I’m not convinced by this distinction, quite frankly. The worst cases of all are when trust-conveying labels like “peer-reviewed publication” provide cover for major errors or worse.

Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822

“metascience”. I hope that history will see a similar movement.

in history it should perhaps be a requirement to upload to some public repository the photographs or transcriptions of any cited archival sources that are not otherwise freely accessible online.

What I simply cannot fathom, now that I’ve read her sources thanks to Jelf’s transcriptions, is how Bulstrode arrived at her narrative at all.

In the 1960s you could find an agricultural historian saying of another that he was “of course entitled to express his views, however bizarre.”

the sheer pervasiveness of errors also allows unintentionally biased narratives to get repeated and become embedded as certainty, and even perhaps gives cover to people who purposefully make stuff up.

History, like any other field, very often relies on trust.

The myth of the food canning innovation prize is a truly ancient one, which I traced back to a mis-translation of a vaguely-worded French source all the way back in 1869.

Take the oft-repeated idea that more troops were sent to quash the Luddites in 1812 than to fight Napoleon in the Peninsular War in 1808. Utter nonsense, as I set out in 2017, though it has been cited again and again and again as fact ever since Eric Hobsbawm first misled everyone back in 1964. Before me, only a handful of niche military history experts seem to have noticed and were largely ignored. Despite being busted, it continues to spread. Terry Deary (of Horrible Histories fame), to give just one of many recent examples, repeated the myth in a 2020 book. Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.

Historical myths, often based on mere misunderstanding, but occasionally on bias or fraud, spread like wildfire. People just love to share unusual and interesting facts

I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis. Replication is when you can repeat an experiment with new data or new materials and get the same result. Reproducibility is when you use exactly the same evidence as another person and still get the same result — so it has a much, much lower bar for success, which is what makes the lack of it in history all the more worrying.

Many of them had made mistakes in the experiments, through negligence, unintended bias, or simple error. A few, quite simply, had been faked. Whole swathes of research and media coverage, including some globally best-selling books, turned out to be based on foundations of sand.

terms as askilled use of words for the sake of communicating knowledge.

frequently you can expect the author,especially a good one, to help you to state the plan of his book.

SET FORTH THE MAJOR PARTS OF THE BOOK, AND SHOW HOW THESE ARE ORGANIZED INTO A WHOLE

say what the whole book is about as briefly as possible.

every book with­out exception that is worth reading at all has a unity and an organization of parts.

"normative," constitutes a very special category of practical books.

what to do about it if we wish to get some­where. This can be summarized in the distinction between knowing that and knowing how.

distinction between knowledge and action

There is so much social science in some contemporary novels, and so much fiction in much of sociology, that it is hard to keep them apart.

he is thinking about his own thoughts.

Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book.

reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written.

Good books are over your head;

idea of the book's truth, in whole or part, and of its significance, if only in your own scheme of things.

your goal in reading

Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement;

It is not necessary to gain more than a general idea of the kind of facts that Jefferson is citing,

In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away. Pay attention to what you can understand

difference between aided and unaided discovery comes into play here.

syntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that may not be in any of the books.

if your goal in reading is simply information

Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systemati­cally

call instruction "aided discovery

abecedarian

we can learn only from our "betters.

But suppose he is reading a history that seeks not merely to give him some more facts but also to throw a new and perhaps more revealing light on all the facts he knows

Reading is a complex activity

The thing that is written and read, like the ball, is the passive object common to the two activities that begin and terminate the process.

Annals of America

scholars’ efforts to share knowledge broadly don’t align with the ways we get and keep jobs at most academic institutions.

a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.

influence common sense rather than cater to it

common sense

He cites Judith Butler (who cites Adorno)

space to use more descriptive or storytelling language, but it is a good way to get complex ideas out into the [academic] world.

space to use more descriptive or storytelling language, but it is a good way to get complex ideas out into the [academic] world.

citing previous conversations in the literature and connecting our ideas to theirs using specialized language

Understanding Hamilton requires subjecting something such as Chernow’s book—hagiography in the contemporary warts-and-all vein—to criticism based on political, economic, legal, and military scholarship (Terry Bouton, Woody Holton, E. J. Ferguson, Wythe Holt, and Richard Kohn come to mind) as well as a close reading of Hamilton himself. I don’t mean his Federalist essays or “The Farmer Refuted,” which intellectual-history mavens will naturally be drawn to. Such writing bears not at all on the bold, improvisatory action that gave Hamilton his real importance. That action sent him at times into outright criminality, far from anyone’s conceptions of political morality, a fact glossed over and explained away by Chernow and therefore omitted by Miranda. Two episodes especially bring that context alive. During the Newburgh Crisis of 1783, the young Hamilton joined his finance mentor Robert Morris—a man central to Hamilton’s formation yet barely mentioned by Chernow, so not depicted by Miranda—in threatening the Congress of the Confederation with a military coup. A decade later, during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, the mature Hamilton ordered door-kicking mass arrests without warrant and detention without charge, and tried to manufacture false evidence against his political enemies. The first episode was formative, the other climactic. Understanding the purposes they served requires intimate knowledge of Hamilton’s “Report on a Military Peace Establishment” and “First Report on the Public Credit,” as well as his interoffice cabinet memos, among other writings that many historians will concede are important yet will never find as appealing as the essays. The writing that made Hamilton Hamilton has nothing to do with the Greco-Whiggish reflections on politics that he could, of course, sling around in the style of the day, though never with the best of them.

Our public history, in particular, remains steeped in barely-examined notions that identify the founders’ motivations—if not solely, then most significantly—with ideas.

silence has consequences, too. One of the most unsettling is the displacement of history by mythmaking. Maybe the directors of The Woman King can be forgiven for their inaccuracies—it is a movie, after all, and films have always been governed by the John Ford rule “print the legend.” But the mythmaking is spreading from “just the movies” to more formal and institutional forms of public memory. If old heroes “must fall,” their disappearance opens voids for new heroes to be inserted in their place

Younger scholars feel oppressed and exploited by universities pressing them to do more labor for worse pay with less security than their elders; older scholars feel that overeager juniors are poised to pounce on the least infraction as an occasion to end an elder’s career and seize a job opening for themselves. Add racial difference as an accelerant

stepping aside might preclude stepping into a controversy about African subjects in the way James Sweet did with his AHA essay.

Scholarly study of Africa in the United States began a century ago with work by Black writers and scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. These writers and scholars were denied research and travel funds, and sometimes even refused access to academic libraries. When private foundations began to fund African research, in the 1920s and ’30s, they instead directed their resources to rising white scholars at elite universities. These credentialed scholars became the leaders of the field in the 1950s and ’60s, when the Cold War made Africa an urgent interest. Those established patterns have come under fiercer and fiercer fire.

The iconoclasm was not confined to the United States, but occurred across the developed world.

“It is the continuing struggle for justice that matters”

Subjugating history to politics has inherent risks, he told me, noting that “the approaches of the hard right are not dissimilar to the way the profession is lurching or creeping today.” The people who hold power inside the academy may feel insulated from the rest of society, but they are subject to the much greater power that can be wielded outside the academy.

When has history-writing been nonpolitical?

There is a move among some of my colleagues to expand the definition of scholarship, to change the way we assess scholarship,” he told me. “I worry there will be a move to de-emphasize the single-author manuscript: the book. Instead, anything that uses the historian’s craft or skills could count as scholarship. The most radical version might even include tweets, or at least blogs or essays online. How do you determine, then, what is political and what is scholarly?

I received almost 250 emails which were almost the inverse image of what was going on on Twitter,” he said. “Those were long, considered, thoughtful emails, not just 280-character responses.

he was on the receiving end of what felt like a determined and willful misunderstanding

I think people looked at and imposed the politics they wanted on the piece. I talked about poor uses of history on the right and the left. But my colleagues saw only the critique of the left. And they’re not used to seeing those.

assumes the continent and its peoples can and should be studied for the benefit of the western student and scholar, that knowledge is a commodity to be extracted from the continent to benefit the western student and scholar.

Sweet’s insistence on detailing Dahomey’s true record was where the debate got hot. Disputes over how history should be written cease to be abstract and remote when they touch the powerfully emotive issues of empire, race, and slavery.

Sweet’s essay opened by remarking on the relative decline of doctoral dissertations on pre-1800 topics.

Should we study the more distant past to explore its strangeness—and thereby jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one? Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn some lessons for shaping the future?

History is not a heuristic tool for the articulation of an ideal imagined future. Rather, it is a way to study the messy, uneven process of change over time.

This is not history; it is dilettantism.

If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise.

bad history yields bad politics.

Historically accurate rendering of Asante or Dahomean greed and enslavement apparently contradict modern-day political imperatives.

African American shrine

Sitting on the table in front of one of the elders was a dog-eared copy of The 1619 Project.

At each of these junctures, history was a zero-sum game of heroes and villains viewed through the prism of contemporary racial identity.

a synthesis of a tradition of Black nationalist historiography dating to the 19th century with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent call for reparations. The project spoke to the political moment, but I never thought of it primarily as a work of history. Ironically, it was professional historians’ engagement with the work that seemed to lend it historical legitimacy.

read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism

historical analyses are contained within an increasingly constrained temporality.

The sheet box

he can also store all Lessing-relatednewspaper essay

547.724.1.004.1

700 (which usually is just written as 7 to preventmisunderstanding

one location where the sheet belongs

well-thought out unity of thoughts

mix-ups within the sheet sequence of a particular keyword

This seems to be the biggestcomplaint about the entire system of the sheet box and its merit.

buying those writing pads

lose

for long notes, but for the far more frequent short notes

most suitable forma

Verzettelung

note book process has been replacedwith a file card system because competition forces them to save time and energy.

as the researcher's mind also matures

merchants created indexe

the enemy of their enemy is their friend

provide the followers with bread and circuses. There is a mundane version of this axiom that fits with sociological findings: make everyday life possible.

too much power

some individuals, but not groups, have unusual gifts for activities like art, athletics, music, or scientific research. Beyond the distinction between collective and distributive power, Russell's definition of power has another advantage. It does not try to reduce the various types of power to any basic type that is said to have "ultimate primacy.

A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do

power is the ability to produce intended effects

Power" is about being able to realize wishes, to produce the effects you want to produce.

some want to attributepower to the structures within which agents act.

the modern individual is the "effect" of power;

power, as it shapes desires and beliefs ill the absence ofobservable conflict, may be at its most effective when leastobservable, thereby posing a considerable challenge toempirical social scienc

In Scott's account,the victims of domination are in a state of constant rebellionand dissemble in order to survive. His book gives a compellingaccount of the tactics and strategies of ingenious, ever-watch-ful slaves, peasants, and untouchables

power can also con-sist in the securing of consent to dominant power relationsthrough the shaping of desires and beliefs

non-decision-making remained deliberate and had to consist insuppressing observable, albeit covert, grievance

This conception of power was,plainly, the narrow individualist, intentional, and active view.Dahl and his colleagues concluded that U.S. cities and,indeed, U.S. politics nationally were "pluralistic" because dif-ferent actors prevailed over different key issues,and thus thatthe elite model was thereby refuted

liberalaversion to dependency relations

asymmetrical relations inwhich power is power over another or others

power can be empow-ering, even transformative, increasing others' resources,capa-bilities, and effectiveness. Examples are nurturing relation-ships such as apprenticeship, teaching, parenting, and thera-py.

can my power consist in nothaving to act because others favor or advance my interests

structure/agency" prob-lem

vehicle fallacy," which occurswhen we equate power with the means or resources ofpower.

exercise fallacy": this occurs when we equatepower with its exercise,as when we define power as winning,

Does this version contain within it the idea of growth or evolution over time? Evergreen note in Matuschak's version does

Dan Allosso