Commonplacing
Ludwik Fleck on Cognition
Cognition is the most socially-conditioned activity of man, and knowledge is the paramount social creation [Gebilde].
– Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (The University of Chicago Press, 1979), Kindle ed., chap. 2, sec. 4.
Hate Speech and Fresh Air
Hate speech is like mold: Its enemies are bright light and fresh air.
– Howard Gillman, “Bigots at the Gate: Universities Shouldn’t Duck the Fight against White Nationalism," Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2016.
Academic Prose
“Science Articles: A Guide”
(the ratio of subject matter complexity to prose complexity) by SMBC Comics
'American Tragedy'
. . . A friend called me full of sadness, full of anxiety about conflict, about war. Why not leave the country? But despair is no answer. To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals—that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do.
– David Remnick, “An American Tragedy,” The New Yorker, November 9, 2016.
Values
American national leaders gain their legitimacy by competing in compliance with not merely the outward forms but the clear values of our Constitution—equal dignity, religious freedom and tolerance, open deliberation, and the rule of law. These values don’t bind Donald Trump; norms of decency do not apply; he shrugs off the very burden of fact itself.
– Garrett Epps, “Donald Trump has broken the Constitution,” The Atlantic, November 9, 2016.
'The American Face of Fascism'
It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.
– Adam Gopnik, “Being Honest about Trump,” The New Yorker, July 14, 2016
Experts <—> Public
In most of today’s university disciplines, professional training serves to distance an individual from the public, to refine them into an ‘expert’ whose speech and writing are marked by incomprehensible formulae and keywords. But history-telling came out of an age before the era of experts, and its form is inherently democratic.
– Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (2014; Cambridge UP, 2015), 56.
Rates of Change
Technology, institutions, mentalities and practices change at different rates. Technology, especially in the age of what has been called ‘the institutionalization of innovation’, changes rapidly. Society and its institutions change more slowly, a result of what has been called institutional ‘inertia’. Last to change are mentalities and practices, illustrating the presence of the past in the world of today.
– Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopaedia to Wikipedia (Polity, 2012), Kindle ed., chap. 9, “Chronologies of Knowledge."
Commonplacing
Some years ago, I used a Tumblr blog as a kind of commonplace book. That fell by the wayside, but lately I’ve felt the need to have a place to save quotes again. Rather than use a separate venue, however, I’ll just collect them here under the commonplacing category.
I don’t intend to take extensive notes this way, but rather to grab things that I think can stand on their own. That’s the plan for now anyway.
Historians Speak about the Profession
Producing Knowledge
Mills Kelly of Edwired responds to the notion that the historical profession is about writing and therefore about publishing in traditional academic print media:
It seems to me that the essence of scholarship is the circulation of knowledge and the discussion of that knowledge among both peers and other interested parties. How is knowledge circulated? Print, the Internet, a museum exhibit, film, radio, are all methods for circulating knowledge and all of them require some sort of writing–even if that writing doesn’t result in yet another monograph or journal article. Just as one example–this blog had more than 75,000 unique visitors in 2007. If I’m lucky, my book will sell 1,000 copies. So how is more knowledge circulated?
Teaching Survey Courses
In The AHA Guide to Teaching and Learning with New Media, John McClymer makes an interesting point about one major difficulty of teaching introductory history classes:
I routinely begin our explorations of topics by asking students to come up with questions. There are several reasons. The most important is that it legitimates confusion. All learning begins in puzzlement, but teachers and students routinely connive in the illusion that students understand the causes of the French Revolution and any number of equally complex developments. The first and second year students in my “Modern Europe and U.S.,1815 to the Present” do not. This is not a failure on their part or mine. A good undergraduate math student can learn to integrate equations in a Calculus I course. An equally good history student cannot master the causes of the French Revolution in an introductory history course.