So I found myself writing a history of our ideas about the body, and I was stuck until I realised one couldn’t do it unless one wrote about how knowledge had advanced – despite the fact that historians aren’t supposed to write about progress. The notion that any discussion of progress must be anachronistic and disrespectful of cultural difference established itself in the 1970s, and no one in the profession has really dared question it since, and the result has been that historians of medicine don’t discuss, any more, whether doctors were actually helping their patients.
.. for the last thirty years historians have shied away from any discussion of why knowledge of nature improved in the seventeenth century because of their fear of writing what is called Whig history, history which is written with the benefit of hindsight; and second, some procedures – such as the experimental method– seem so obvious to us that we have difficulty in thinking our way back into a world where that method was not employed; and some ways of thinking, embodied in our language, seem so natural that people simply haven’t been aware of the historical process which led to their construction.
.. The discovery of America proved that the knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans was seriously incomplete – it encouraged people to believe in the possibility of progress in knowledge, and this was embodied in a new word, “discovery”, and a new practice,eponymy, naming discoveries after people (America after Amerigo Vespucci). It is only after the discovery of America, for example, that Pythagoras’s theorem is named after Pythagoras – innovation was now rewarded with immortal fame.
.. it became clear that long-standing debates amongst the philosophers could be definitively settled by the acquisition of new information – the idea seems obvious to us, but that is only because we live in a post-Columbus world.
.. The printing press is crucial in intensifying the communication of information – it makes it possible to consult more sources, compare authorities, keep up to date with new discoveries. It thus creates a new type of intellectual community and a new type of knowledge – knowledge that has passed the test of being subjected to the critical inspection of a wider community of experts, what we call “peer review”.
.. Newton, I argue, could only propound his new theory of gravity because he had the idea of a “theory” – something very different from a proof on the one hand or a working hypothesis on the other. So I think historians and scientists as they work on the history of science regularly overlook the power of certain intellectual tools ..
I’ve heard that Lord Jeffery Amherst distributed smallpox-infected blankets to the Indians during the French and Indian War. True?
4. I’ve heard that Lord Jeffery Amherst distributed smallpox-infected blankets to the Indians during the French and Indian War. True?
In the summer of 1763, attacks by Native Americans against colonists on the western frontier seriously challenged British military control. In a letter to Colonel Henry Bouquet dated July 7, 1763, Amherst writes “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?” In a later letter to Bouquet Amherst repeats the idea: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.” There is evidence that the Captain at Fort Pitt (outside Pittsburgh, PA — then the western frontier) did give two infected blankets and one infected handkerchief to Indians in June of 1763. This action happened before Amherst mentioned the idea in his correspondence. It is also highly unlikely that the tactic caused any infection.
It is accurate to say that Lord Jeffery Amherst advocated biological warfare against Indians, but there is no evidence that any infected blankets were distributed at his command. For more about Lord Jeffery Amherst’s military career, see Professor Kevin Sweeney’s article “The Very Model of a Modern Major General.” For a detailed examination of Amherst’s role in the Fort Pitt smallpox episode, see “The British, the Indians, and Smallpox: What Actually Happened at Fort Pitt in 1763?” by Philip Ranlet.
The Internet That Never Was
Micropayments were a key element in Andreeson’s own original plans for the web, but partly because HTML links are one-way only, the only method available for incorporating this idea into the web’s design would have required active participation by the financial services industry, which turned out to be hopelessly difficult. According to Andreeson, “The credit card systems and banking system made it impossible. We tried hard, but it was so painful to deal with those guys. It was cosmically painful.”
.. In Isaacson’s view of the situation, had the Worldwide Web been based on two-way links instead of one-way links, then today it would be possible “to meter the use of links and allow small automatic payments to accrue to those who produced the content that was used. The entire business of publishing and journalism and blogging would have turned out differently. Producers of digital content could have been compensated in an easy, frictionless manner, permitting a variety of revenue models, including ones that did not depend on being beholden solely to advertisers. Instead the Web became a realm where aggregators could make more money than content producers.”
Edward Gibbon and the importance of great writing to great history.
How did this preposterous little man—a snob with often ludicrous opinions who was known as he grew older and fatter as Monsieur Pomme de Terre—produce The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a panoramic work of roughly a million and a half words with some 8,000 footnotes, covering 1,300 years of history?
.. Nietzsche said that a married philosopher is a joke. A married historian, productive in the way Gibbon was, is not so much a joke but perhaps an impossibility. One can be the author of a vast historical work of the kind of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was 20 years in the composing, or be happily married, but one is unlikely to bring off both.
.. “I am persuaded that had I been more indigent or more wealthy, I should not have possessed the leisure or the perseverance to prepare and execute my voluminous history.”
.. to a true writer, no experience is wasted.
.. No one who has read it will forget his capping sentence after describing the battle of Salice toward the close of the fourth century, where dead soldiers were left on the ground without burial: “Their flesh was greedily devoured by the birds of prey, who, in that age, enjoyed very frequent and delicious feasts . . . ” His hatred of war was genuine. “Military discipline and tactics,” he reminds us, “are about nothing more than the art of destroying the human species.”
.. “The novelist is the historian of the present and the historian the novelist of the past.”
.. He produced such biographies through his erudition but did so concisely through his unparalleled powers of formulation. Pope Boniface VIII “entered [his holy office] like a fox, reigned like a lion, and died like a dog.”
.. Through 20 years of solitary labor, this chubby little man also proved that the first, if not the sole, criterion for a great historian is to be a great writer.