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

Tree Classification Systems

s. Many dissenting 'philosophes'felt themselves to be in the grip of a tyranny from which America provided the onlyescape. In all their correspondence there is a dominant theme-emigration. Thenames of the land lots on the Priestley lands on the Susquehanna give an idea of thevaried localities from which the English emugres came-Bristol, Birmingham, Man-chester, Norwich, et

English 'philosophes' began to see that the Revolution had succumbed to mobviolence, though it is doubtful whether they suspected that the mob was beingsteered. Young Watt still makes a defence for the revolutionaries, but it is clear thathis stomach is beginning to turn:I am filled with involuntary horror at the scenes which pass before me and wish theycould have been avoided, but at the same time I allow the absolute necessity of them.16 Insome instances the vengeance of the people has been savage & inhuman. They havedragged the dead naked body of the Princess de Lamballe through the streets &treated it with all sorts of indignities. Her head stuck upon a Pike was carried throughParis and shown to the King & Queen, who are in hourly expectation of the samefate

Burke attacked them fiercely in the Commons, his rhetoric beingemployed to great effect but with no true moderation. 'There were in this country',he said, 'men who scrupled not to enter into an alliance with a set in France of theworst traitors and regicides that had ever been heard of-the club of Jacobins'. 1 Heattacked by name Thomas Cooper, James Watt and Thomas Walker. ImmediatelyJames Watt senior wrote to ask his son to be more moderate lest the antipathy hearoused might allow Boulton and Watt's enemies, the Hornblowers, to get a billthrough Parliament weakening Watt's patent for the steam engine.

Oppression, for these young men, attaining their majorities just as the Revolutionbegan, was a series of incidents which they had observed with their own eyes-not adistant and distanced scene. In their criticism of the French aristocracy androyalty they had been nodded encouragement by their fathers and their fathers'friends who greeted the Revolution with rapture, and held banquets to commemoratethe fall of the Bastille. As the young men came mainly from Dissenting homes so theyresented religious domination, as they were middle class they abhorred the idlenessof the aristocrac

Birmingham, MatthewBoulton armed his employees against the Priestley rioter

on a fine summer's evening towards theend ofJuly I 789, Harry Priestley burst into her parents' house at Barr shouting'Hurrah! Liberty, Reason, brotherly love for ever! ... France is free, the Bastilleis taken. '74 Two years later that young man's father, Dr Joseph Priestley, wasstill insisting that the combined effects of the American and the FrenchRevolutions had shifted the world 'from darkness to light, from superstition tosound knowledge, and from a most debasing servitude to a state of the mostexalted freedom

The cultural climate that had allowedinformal and socially dilute bodies like the Lunar Society to flourish haddisintegrated and would not be reconstituted for a generation and more. Theemigration to America of Dr Priestley, together with many hundreds of less-well-known 'friends of liberty' acknowledged as much.A period of twenty-two years of nearly continuous continental and maritimewarfare after I792 would also gravely weaken the free trade in knowledgewhich the philosophes had taken for grante

James appears toconcede as much on I December in a reference to the fate of the Brissotins: 'myfriends in France, the friends of rational liberty have most of them passed thefatal guillotine and the reigning party were always objects of my hatred aswell as Mr Cooper's

contradictions and dilemmas of the late Enlightenment. Isknowledge value-free? How should it be transmitted? Ought it be madeavailable to all, irrespective of social station?

. These cursed French have murdered Philosophy & continue totorment all of Europe.

s theformation of a discrete 'family' of philosophes in the West Mclose links with their counterp

raft of a branching diagram concerning politics, found in the Zwinger manuscripts alongside a set of “annotationsin the first books of Aristotle’s Politics

steady sellers despite their considerable size andexpense and despite being accessible only to the Latin-literate.

Bacon called for general-izations from particulars to manage the excess data accumulated through ex-perience

Ephraim Chambers’

t was not the newly recovered ancient texts (Lucretius or Sextus Empiricus) that accounted for the ever- increasing size of collections of quo-tations in florilegia, but rather increased attention to long- familiar ancient au-thors central to humanist education (like Ovid, Horace, and Cicero) and a large number of recent works generated by reflection on the classics (e.g., Petrarch or the emblems of Alciati and Camerarius). A new attitude toward seeking out and stockpiling information was the crucial cause of the information explosion, more significant than any particular new discovery.

ffered ready- made in print the kinds of notes readers wished to have available even if they had not taken them themselves

to produce knowledge principally from the study of an-cient texts

interdependence of ideas with the social and material contexts of their formation

four crucial operations: storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing,

Compilers were therefore conveyors of information rather than of their own opinions or positions

distinct from data (which requires further processing before it can be meaningful) and from knowledge (which implies an individual knower).

both Edward Royle and SusanBudd have found that members of the British secularist movement camemainly from the urban working and lower middle classes

prison for blasphemy,1111luding Richard Carlile, Charles Southwell, George Holyoake, and G.W.I rnitc

atheists' racial views wereshaped in large part by their status as a marginalized group in Britain andthe United States.

Another variety of unbelief came in the form of ethical societies.I h1• London South Place Chapel had roots as a Unitarian church in late, 11-1litccnth-centuryAmerica. It crossed the Atlantic to London in 1822.l •11dcrMoncure Conway, a Virginian who had relocated to London in 1863

Americanfreethinkers took up the former Unitarian pastor Francis EllingwoodAbbot's "Nine Demands of Liberalism,

Utilitarianismwould be further developed by the British liberal philosopher John StuartMill in the nineteenth century. For much of his life, Mill was a colonialadministrator with the East India Company, and he was elected as a LiberalMP from 1865 to 1868. Mill's philosophy emphasized individual rights anddemocratic freedoms, including advocacy of women's suffrage.

tilitarianism, anon-Christian system of morals. This philosophy, devised in the late eight-eenth century by Jeremy Bentham

Like Southwell and so many other atheists, Holyoakealso spent time behind bars for his views. He would later establish his ownnewspapers, the longest-running of which was the Reasoner, published from1846 to 1861.Through this paper, Holyoake became one of the most promi-nent irreligious leaders in the country as he built bridges.with middle-classintellectuals and liberal theists. He coined the term "secularism" in the 1850sas a replacement for "atheism." In Holyoake's view, a secularist outlook dif-fered from an atheist one in the sense that it was not wholly destructive butsought to establish a framework for ethics that was independent of religion.In other words, Holyoake saw atheism as a purely negative creed, whereassecularism was a positive one.

Charles Southwell createdI hl• newspaper the Oracle of Reason along with William Chilton

Owen's skepticism of11•ligionwent hand-in-hand with his reformist politics.

Robert Owen, who, like Paine, was influential onhotb sides of the Atlantic.54 Owen gained national prominence in the firstlt,llf of the nineteenth century for his utopian experiments in Britain andmerica based on his radical view of human nature as being determined,tlmost entirely by circumstances

Paine argued that all revelationsclaiming to be from the deity were invalid and that one could discern God'sworks through a study of nature.

link between secularization and eugenics was not straightforward

Adrian Desmond and JamesMoore, two of the most important Darwin scholars, who argue convinc-ingly in a recent book that Darwin's evolutionary research was animatedby a hatred of polygenesis and the ways in which it could be used to justifyslavery or imperial conquest

in Britain at least, "religious monogenism and anti-slavery agitationwent hand-in-hand."

Nineteenth-century atheists and freethinkers were profoundly rooted inthe thought of the Enlightenment and therefore also inherited many ofthese contradictions.

opened theway to a secular or scientific racism by considering human beings part of theanimal kingdom rather than viewing them in biblical terms as children of Godendowed with spiritual capacities denied to other creatures.

racism had to bel'mancipated from Christian universalism

"hereditary heathenism," in Rebecca Goetz's terminology, whichsaw Africans as essentially and permanently godless heathens who couldnever truly become Christian

some historians haveseen in medieval anti-Semitism the genesis of modern racism

On the one hand, they imag-ined themselves at the pinnacle of the racial and civilization hierarchy. Buton the other, the vast majority of their countrymen were Christians whoseemed to reject the West's greatest gifts, namely reason and science,

Might these cultures actually offer their own virtues that were superiorin some ways to Christianity?

ineteenth-century freethinkers, onthe other hand, banded together in various organizations ana. sought toconvey their irreligious message to all segments of society, particularly thelower classes

Racialscience, with its emphasis on racial classifications based on physical andmental features - such as measurements of the skull

Christianityheld that all humans were created in the image of God and descended fromAdam and Eve

itremains disputed whether secularization helped open the way for racism orwhether it provided new ways to challenge racism.

humanity’s early days on the Africansavanna

,650 years ago in east-central China's Yellow River Valley, a community known as the Yangshao bur-ied a child wrapped in a silk shroud

he insect cannot feed itself

d,tlirultir, ,w, r l{'h1d1

<\I H l lTl.1:.

It is impossible to think without writing; at least it is impossible in any sophisticated or networked (anschlußfähig) fashion

make it possible to retrieve more ina later query via the pivotal keyword index than what was intended when the notes were initially taken

relations between the nodes (i.e. notes)

a keyword index

Often Luhmann noted the references directly as he created the card but also regularly updated alreadyexisting cards by adding references whenever the integration of new cards in other parts of the collectionmade it necessary

relevant to the special argument

outline of an article or the table of contents of a book

nearly every second note (second collection) on average.

a nearly infinite number of cards between what hadinitially been two consecutive cards created at the same time on a related subjec

1/1 Card with notes referring to a certain topic1/1a Card containing notes referring to a particular idea from card 1/11/1b Continuation of notes

embedding a topic in various contexts gives rise todifferent lines of information by means of opening up different realms of comparison

difficultyof assigning an issue to one and only one single (top-level) subject, which is a matter of ambiguity or soto say conceptual indecisiveness. Luhmann solved this problem by seizing it as an opportunity: instead ofsubscribing to the idea of a systematic classification system, he opted for organizing entries based on theprinciple that they must have only some relation to the previous entry

he second collection, by design, is quite moreproblem-oriented, reflecting the emerging sociological interests of Luhmann: It consists of only eleventop-level subject area

in the evening he transferred the often only rudimentaryrecords he made during the day into new notes according to his special filing technique

75,000 cards) consist of notes documenting the results ofLuhmann’s readings, but also his own thoughts and theoretical arguments and concepts. The notes re-sulting from his readings are not simply excerpts; what mattered to him was “what could be utilized inwhich way for the cards that had already been written. Hence, when reading, I always have the questionin mind of how the books can be integrated into the filing system

a growing distrust ofexpertise, including medical science,

especially among Republicans

Guided by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Jacobson, all50 states put laws on the books mandating vaccinations for school children.

the Court upheldVirginia’s policy of sterilizing women deemed unfit to bear children, also using Jacobsonas precedent. “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination,” wrote Justice OliverWendell Holmes, Jr., “is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

a public health emergency,

social compact...that all shall be governed by certain laws for the protection, safety,prosperity and happiness of the people,

1905, the issue of vaccine mandates reached the Supreme Court

process known as variolation

your refusal has cost allof us

claims of individual rights clash head-on with public healthmeasures designed to urgently save lives

dwindling under its impact to 150 effective men and eventually withdrawing from Virginia entirely. "Had it not been for this horrid disorder," wrote Dunmore, "I should have had two thousand blacks; with whom I should have had no doubt of penetrating into the heart of this Colony.

Carleton's humane treat- ment of American smallpox victims taken prisoner when the siege ended would seem to undermine the argument that he deliberately infected the America

"The small pox rages all over the Town," wrote George Wash- ington from his headquarters in nearby Cambridge on December 14. "Such of the [British] Military as had it not before, are now under innoculation-this I appre- hend is a weapon of Defence, they Are useing against us."3

e Earl of Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment on the Ches- apeak

William W Warren, History of the Ojibway Nation (1884

since they had caught the disease while fighting for the French, the French were therefore responsible for the devastation it caused.

. In 1755-1756 and again in 1757-1758, the disease wreaked havoc among the Indians allied with the French. After the Lake George campaign of 1757, the French-allied Potawatomis suffered greatly in a smallpox ou

e propagation of smallpox had the advantage of deniabili

rate of 0.5 to 2.0 percent from inoculated smallpox seemed enviable by compar- ison to the case fatality rate of 20 to 30 percent from the natural form of the illness

Cotton Mather.

" inoculation had seen use for hundreds of years elsewhere in the world before Europeans learned of the procedure. Then, at virtually the same moment, in the four-year period from 1713 to 1717, Europeans around the globe latched onto the practice and sent word of it ho

e records for June 1763 include this invoice submitted by Levy, Trent and Company: To Sundries got to Replace in kind those which were taken from people in the Hospital to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians Vizt: 2 Blankets ............@20/ Ul2" 0 0 1 Silk Handkerchef ..... 10/ & 1 linnendo: ......... 3/6 0" 13" 6 Captain Ecuyer certified that the items "were had for the uses above mentioned," and Gen. Thomas Gage ultimately approved the invoice for payment, endorsing it with a comment and

t. "Out of our regard to them," wrote Wil- liam Trent, "we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."

at accusations of what we now call biological warfare-the military use of smallpox in particular-arose fre- quently in eighteenth-century Am

In the cyber world, connections are with people one has never met in real life; infiltration by government agents has proven to be extremely easy1818 This is one of the weaknesses of complete decentralization.View all notes . By comparison, the mafia required a Sicilian lineage for ‘friends of ours’ for security clearance. One never knows the degree of governmental surveillance and its real capabilities.

the most effective inflation hedge can be a combination of bets which includes short positions in government bonds.