Month: June 2018
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First published on History of Knowledge, February 3, 2017. In my initial academic encounters with Germany in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the things that impressed me was the availability of handbooks as well as specialized encyclopedias such as Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. The textbook series Oldenbourg Grundriss der…
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Sometimes disseminating the results of experiments, demonstrations, or other research can yield widely accepted knowledge built on questionable foundations through a kind of distorted translation. This seems to have happened with the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. Two people who heard a recent talk by Alexander Haslam tweeted about Haslam’s key…
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We tried something new in connection with a conference called Learning by the Book. The conveners asked participants to submit a blog post to History of Knowledge in lieu of precirculated papers. One of the conveners, my colleague Kerstin von der Krone, did most of the coordinating work, prescreening posts…
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Four photographs of DC’s Metro: All DC area residents have complaints and even horror stories to tell about the Metro. Since introducing it to children in the family from out of town, I’ve started looking at it with fresh eyes.
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Photograph of elephant seals on the coast of California.