The notion of ‘history from below’ hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s. Robert Darnton Read Quote
I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought. Robert Darnton Read Quote
As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s. Robert Darnton Read Quote
While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Robert Darnton Read Quote
People sometimes announce that we have entered ‘the information age’ as if information did not exist in other times. I think that every age was an age of information, each in its own way and according to the available media. Robert Darnton Read Quote
