Historiography
Big History and Big Buts
Several years ago, when I was working on a Big Project, I stumbled across the concept of Big History.* It’s basically the opposite of the academic mantra “not my field.” Proponents of Big History integrate many scholarly disciplines in order to look at human history as a tiny part of the history of the cosmos. …
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In which I consider the nature of primary sources, with a little despair
My primary academic home is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,* periods in which primary sources and material artifacts are relatively abundant. As a result, the question of whether something counts as a primary source is generally clear–at least in terms of a given sources’s temporal relationship to the event/period in question.** (How we…
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Medieval People
In Medieval People: Vivid Lives in a Distant Landscape, historian Michael Prestwich [author of Knight: The Medieval Warrior’s (Unofficial) Manual] challenges generalities about the Middle Ages* by looking at the specific: biographies of 69 people who lived between 800 and 1500, a period that stretches from Charlemagne’s empire to the early Renaissance. Prestwich’s choice of…
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