New Books In World Affairs
Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, “Natural Experiments of History” (Harvard UP, 2010)
- Autor: Vários
- Narrador: Vários
- Editor: Podcast
- Duración: 1:02:24
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Sinopsis
I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and place their entire careers. If you begin, say, as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (as I did), you are likely to end as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (I didn’t, but that’s another story). “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “Don’t historians get bored with their little time and place?” “Yes,” I replied. “Don’t they exhaust the topic and begin to work in circles?” “Yes, quite often” I replied. “Don’t they want to compare what they’ve learned about time/place X with time/place Y in order to better understand both X and Y?” “Probably,” I replied. “Then why,” she asked, “do historians continue to work the way they do?” It’s a good question, and one that deserves to be answered. On the one hand, ‘more and more about less and less’ has certainly enabled us–that is, the historical profession–to uncover a lot of the past that might have been forgotten. But, on the other hand, we’ve gone so far ‘inside baseball’ that