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E.P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class

This book, while a bit ponderous, was quite interesting.

I’ve read
dozens of authors who acknowledge a debt to Thompson, so I’ve been eager
to read it. The size, and having a week to read it, meant that I had to
“gloss” or “gut” the book more than read it, but I enjoyed the task, and
hope to return to it when I have more time. (I never thought I’d see the
day when I see Foucault coming up in a syllabus and think, “finally, a
nice quick read!”)

This book looks at the rise of class consciousness among the British
working classes in the period between the 1790s and the 1830s. Thompson
divides the book up into three sections.  The first section is primarily
an intellectual and religious history. I found it a bit hard to follow,
as I’m not too familiar with the history of many of the groups that
Thompson feels it is sufficient to simply mention without explanation.
For this reason, I have to admit I had wikipedia on my laptop next to me
for a lot of this section.

The next section looks at material and
cultural conditions in the lives of workers—looking at specific
industries before moving onto issues of standards of living, religion in
the lives of the poor and working class, and broader cultural issues of
leisure, immigration, etc. The final section deals with conflicts that
represent the inchoate working class coming toward a final class
consciousness in the first part of the nineteenth century.

The thing that most struck me about the book was Thompson’s emphasis on
class consciousness, rather than simply class. Many Marxist scholars,
moreso even than Marx himself, have this tendency to see class as a
structural fact. Under capitalism, there are workers and there are
capitalists, and therefore class exists, and should be treated as a
material reality.

Thompson argues that it is awareness of class
structures, and the perception of more commonalities within class strata
than across them. For this reason, the book deals with the period that
it does—Thompson trying to record the advent of workers’ class
consciousness, and the process of its formation. He questions the common
assumption that industrialization necessarily and immediately brought
about the creation of a new working class, arguing that “…we should not
assume any automatic, or over-direct, correspondence between the dynamic
of economic growth and the dynamic of social or cultural life.” (p. 192)
It’s a situation of correlation and impact rather than direct causation.

Overall, I don’t necessarily agree with the argument put forth by some of the folks in my Historiography class that Thompson is unduly influenced by Marxist ideology.
Given the context of his times, there were many Marxists who were still
very strict adherents of dialectical materialism. In the consistent
emphasis he places on the social and cultural, Thompson signals a break
from such strict by-the-Das-Kapital Marxists.

Of course, I’m the product of a loose socialist upbringing, and went to
a pretty overwhelmingly Marxist college. So there’s a chance I’m just a
little blind to overt commie propaganda…

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…making history “cool?”

History isn’t cool.

I was reading through sepoy’s Polyglot Manifesto (part 2) and came across the following:

…what if I reimagined the text anew. What if I scanned, annotated, tagged all five manuscripts and the translation into a comprehensible data-structure
and presented the text so that the reader could peel, as it were, the
layers of various recensions; read the translation against the
manuscripts; follow the thread or theme in and out of various chapters?
And coolest of all: What if my reader could annotate and tag and link
my medieval persian text to another medieval persian text and another
still? What if the texts spoke to one another and threads connect the
reader, the text and the historian?
(emphasis mine…)

sepoy’s using two or three meanings to the term "cool," here, although I think they’re almost inextricably linked in today’s web 2.0 world. The most obvious, there’s the sense of the word "cool" as "hip." In another sense, the word can be used to less specifically mean "novel." And then, of course, because it’s impossible to leave the guy behind completely, there’s the Marshall McLuhan sense of the word– as in "hot" and "cool" media:

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that
extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state
of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition."
A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information
is provided. the ear is given a meager amount of information. Telephone
is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a
meager amount of information. And speech is a
cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has
to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave
so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore,
low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion
by the audience.  Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has
very different effects on the user from a cool
medium like the telephone.

(From Understanding Media)

I have to briefly digress, and say that the internet, especially in its more recent form as web 2.0, actually completely breaks down McLuhan’s division of hot and cool. Is a hot medium? Well, the computer is actually rather "high-definition," so yes– there’s a very precise relay of information. There’s very little "static." Is it a cool medium? Absolutely– despite the high level of definition, it is more participatory than any electronically-mediated medium McLuhan could have imagined in his lifetime– he passed on in 1980. However, the level of "definition" is illusory, because there is no beginning or end to "the internet," and no singular reading. It’s high-definition from single web page to single web page, "well filled with information," but the "edges" bleed. Hypermedia is almost like frostbite. The internet is so cool it feels hot.

sepoy, and others like him in the Digital Humanities, see the future of our discipline shifting toward a "cooling" of History. Historians like hot media. They like books. They like being able to craft their argument, control the ways their work is interpreted and used. And this is an understandable impulse.

But the argument for the Digital Humanities makes sense to me. By using new media’s ability to increase participation, Historians can raise awareness of History– not as an event or single narrative, or a set of facts in temporal order, but as a process of understanding, as a whole set of methodologies and techniques of interpretation and evaluation, as a form of textual analysis.

There’s a widely circulated quotation from Diane Feinstein during the hearings about the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian back in 1995, "…is it really the role to interpret history, rather than just simply to put forward historical facts…? …I was a history major. In the days when I studied the text… was essentially a recitation of fact, leaving the reader to draw their own analysis…"*

This is the popular view of History, among a large portion of the population– even, obviously, among the well-educated and powerful in this country.

Interactivity and new media give us a chance to help rectify this situation, to show that "doing history" is always, and inherently, a process of making choices, of highlighting and omission, of reconstructing the past in relevant ways, and ultimately, is a manner of understanding not the past, but the present.

_____________________

* This quote can be found in multiple articles, it was a bit of a flashpoint. I found it in an article by James Gardner from The Public Historian (Vol. 26, No. 4) however, the citation for the quote in this article is mis-attributed, so I cannot vouch for the accuracy.

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Hope for those of us with no style…

In response to Karin’s question, "Is there hope for those of us with no style?" I just want to offer a resounding "Yes!"

To put it bluntly, having a cool, ultra-high-functioning, slick-looking web page is great. It’s a good goal, after all, attractive things work better. That said, this is a difficult goal. Personally, I’m never going to have a good color sense. I know that about myself, and when it comes to my "art," I’ve found ways around it. You can’t get around it on the web, really. Color’s ubiquitous.

HOWEVER, let’s put aside that goal of the cool, ultra-high-functioning, slick-looking web page. Let’s start by going for something more obtainable:

Let’s start by trying to design web sites that don’t suck.

Blunt, I know, but it’s the truth. And in even better news, there is someone out there who takes it upon himself to show us web pages that suck, and explain what they did wrong. thus sparing us from making the same mistakes. If blogs are a bit much reading for you, he has a YouTube account, where you can watch films where he tries to navigate suck-y web pages and provides color commentary. It’s fun and educational, check it out.

Here’s one I enjoyed:

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…back from the holiday hiatus…

…And with a new look, that I think is kinda exciting. I finally gave in to the popular belief that serif fonts don’t work online, and that full justifies are bad web design.

Moreover, I added a bit more color to the place, and I’ve got that pretty header up there. That one’s the result of my second-semester History and Web Design class… I wanted to create an overall look between this site and the portfolio site for that class. Something about creating a "personality" or a "brand" for my web-presence.

Not to mention that I’ll probably be setting up a blog over on that site rather than here at some point. So yeah, greetings from the new Leisurely Historian ™!

Look here for some new material in the next few weeks… there’s a couple things I’ve got brewing, and a follow-up to a recent post.

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Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

Braudel’s first volume of “The Mediterranean” is a great work of
scholarship. It certainly displays a great mastery of a variety of
topics, a knowledge that is notable in both its depth and breadth. It’s
also a logical inclusion in the syllabus of an historiography class, as
Braudel is fundamentally attempting to shift the focus of what had been
previously considered historical thought—a trend that would only proliferate in the next
half-century, ending in the current state of affairs, where the
sub-disciplines of History are so numerous and compartmentalized that
sometimes it seems they can hardly recognize one another.

Braudel attempts to refocus the discipline, which he seems to see as
overly focused on the political, military, and biographical. His
response is to produce a work that moves from the socio-geographic to
the socio-economic and demographic. It’s definitely well-written,
well-researched, and full of those curious tidbits that keep a reader
interested when reading a rather dry history text.

While my attention
wandered at times, I found the book intensely interesting at others.

One thing that particularly grabbed my interest was the section on mail
and couriers on pages 355-371, as it seemed to give a much deeper
background to something I found interesting in Habermas’s “Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere,” but which Habermas unfortunately
glossed over in a matter of a few paragraphs.

Another was his repeated
use, in his socio-geographic description of the mountain ranges of the
Mediterranean, of the word “civilization.” Unlike Prescott a hundred
years earlier, Braudel seems to use the word in a very value-neutral
sense, as a complex that includes both positive features like improved
quality of life, refinements, etc., but also features negative
qualities, such as greater and more widespread despotism, heightened
class disparity, corruption of the clergy, etc. It seemed a very modern,
progressive view.

All of this aside, however, I had an overall negative response to the
book. It seemed to me that Braudel was over-reaching with this work—he
created a book with an impossible scope, and thus inevitably, the result
is mixed at best. To attempt a history of such a large area is a very
difficult task, and to do so through multiple lenses, without a single
unifying grand narrative or theoretical structure, seems downright
foolhardy.  The result is a book that is meandering, at time confusing,
and desultory in its organization and evidence.

While it may or may not
have been the author’s decision, not indexing the first volume within
the first volume seems to me to be a horrible decision, one that reduces
the use of the book as a reference, while the complaints I’ve listed
above make it highly unlikely I’ll ever decide to re-read the book at
leisure.

That said, as someone who is very interested in historical cultural
geography, the book fascinated me, as it seems to represent just that,
in its nascent state, before the birth of cultural theory and cultural
history.

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W. H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico

This book, while it is certainly limited by Prescott’s particular time,
place, worldview, etc. must also be admitted
to be quite amazing, if only for its perniciousness. 

I was talking
about my homework with one of my roommates, and when I said that I was
reading an eighteenth century account of the conquest of Mexico, he
immediately responded, “Oh, so you must be reading Prescott!” It turns
out he read the book in Spanish when he was in university in Argentina.
He said Prescott is quite well-known throughout South America, and is
actually quite celebrated in Peru, the conquest of which is the subject
of another of his books.

Not bad for a half-blind man who never left Boston while writing about
South American history over 150 years ago.

Prescott’s biases are pretty obvious, and pretty strong. He’s definitely working within his century’s racial logic, with his construction of
“civilization” as a tiered structure, where, for example the Aztecs rate
above North American Indians, but below the Chinese, who in turn are
lower than Western culture.

But there’s something that several of my classmates said or intimated that I
don’t completely agree with—or at least that I see as an
oversimplification. While Prescott is obviously a little too forgiving
of Spanish transgressions against Native peoples, and a little too
dismissive of the sophistication of Native cultures, I think it’s
problematic to say that he’s not damning of the Spanish at times.

Honestly, I think that Prescott is fairly cynical about a lot of Spanish
activities in the conquest, especially taking into account his time. His
interpretation of Spanish conversions of the Indians, for example. He’s
not willing to forgive some transgressions that others may have.

Given his time and place, Prescott was bound to have lived around a
decent amount of anti-Catholic bias, and this seems to have rubbed off
on his interpretation of some Spanish activities.

I’d wager that the
book might be even more damning of the Spanish if it had been published
five or ten years later, after the influx of Irish immigrants into
Boston. Keep in mind that Prescott’s grandfather, given his age and
class, likely would have participated in Guy Fawkes day in Boston as a
young man, with its burning of effigies of the Pope and the Devil.

If anything, Prescott is forgiving of the Spanish, not because of an
affinity or like-mindedness, but because he sees among them a few “great
men,” of the sort believed to be the makers of history in that time.

Cortez is certainly one of them, by Prescott’s estimation. Queen
Isabella seems to be another—the expulsion of 1492 being glossed over in
a single sentence. (p. 157) He briefly comments on the barbarism of the
early years of the Inquisition, but the final effect, the expulsion,
gets a gloss.

Contrasting his portrayal of Cortez throughout the book with that of Las
Casas at the end of Book 2 is a good way to see the bias toward “great
men” with epic stories. Cortez is almost something out of a Greek myth,
or a superhero. While he was admirable, however, “Las Casas, in short,
was a man.”(275-276.)

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Revision…

I’ve heard it said that writing is like giving birth to a child.
It’s painful, it seems to take forever, you’re likely to wish you’d
never started it about halfway through, and at the end of the process,
you’re left with something that, perfect or not, you’re completely
enamored of. If that’s the case, revision’s kind of like performing
brain surgery on your child. It’s really difficult, and you’re
constantly afraid that you’ll hurt it.

I certainly have that feeling whenever I revise a paper that’s less
than six months old—eventually I *can* gain distance from ‘em, but when
I’m revising something fairly recently written, like a paper for a
seminar—I’m far too attached to it, and I’m constantly second-guessing
myself. I feel clumsy, like every change is actually making things more
complicated and confusing. I have trouble not rewriting a phrase three
or four times. Often at least one of those times, it reverts to the
original.

I’ve been plowing through this thing, a couple times over. Other
than direct changes recommended by the professor, not too much is changing.
There’s tidying up, and some added bits, and some structural changes to
sections, but this isn’t the most radical rewrite.

The recommendation to follow was the elimination of my three
block-quotes. I really like block quotes—and I like a lot of them. I
always prefer to let the original voices speak for themselves, as much
as possible. While I know it’s necessary, my instincts seem to be
better satisfied with providing a minimum of interpretation and
explanations. I think part of me would be happier editing a volume of
selected primary source texts than actually writing a book.

The first and third block quote, honestly, weren’t too bad to weave
through a paragraph. There were parts of those quotes that could be
eliminated—or at least elided or paraphrased. The middle one,
though—I’m not sure it works.

It’s from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt, and it’s already edited
down—there were two ellipses in the block quote as it was. The rhetoric
is pretty lean and well-constructed, and the language mirrors the same
ideas I’ve already established into the paper—something that I feel
strengthens my argument. So not too much gets edited out. It ends up in
two quotation-loaded paragraphs.

I really feel like the parts of those paragraphs that are mine don’t
really add too much. It feels like when you get a used textbook and the
previous owner’s highlighted only the most obvious passages. I trust
the recommendation, ‘cause the other two didn’t need to be block
quotes, and I can see that now, but I didn’t until it was pointed out
to me. But it doesn’t feel effective.

Other than that—the introduction was easier to fix than I’d
thought—I knew it was too long before, and while the thesis now falls
in between pages two and three, that’s still better than when it was
toward the bottom of page three.

The conclusion, on the other hand, is still weaker than I’d like.
I’m no good with conclusions—I never found a satisfactory strategy for
dealing with them. I end up just restating my initial argument in a
more detailed way, and then do the verbal equivalent of creeping
backwards out of the room. I know the first part is the right strategy,
but the latter part—that’s sheer desperation. I try different
strategies for the final paragraph, but they all end up sounding like
I’m trailing off.

Otherwise, yeah. Just keeping it to basic stuff. Unnecessary shifts
in tense or person. Trying to avoid the passive voice. Making my
assertions stronger.

That part’s kind of counterintuitive. In American Studies, I feel
that a lot more emphasis is placed on agency and contingency and the
inevitable incompleteness of outside interpretation. You hedge your
bets. Even if you have evidence to support that someone did something
for a certain reason, it’s safer and more accurate to say he “seems to
have been doing it for this reason.” It’s about not speaking for your
subjects. In History, from what the professor has told me and what I’ve
noticed in our readings for this class, it’s seen as sufficient to say
that the guy did it for that reason. More of a voice of certainty and
authority. After two years in an American Studies program, that’ll be a
hard habit to break.

Overall, though, it’s almost finished, and I’m pretty sure that I have at least not made it any worse.

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“Marketing” is such a dirty word…

Reading the chapter in Digital History on building an audience was pretty interesting. It was a lot of stuff I’ve thought of before– I’m a pretty shameless self-promoter when it comes down to it, especially in the semi-anonymity of the Internet– and some other stuff I hadn’t. As someone who’s been slow to subscribe to H-Net, for example, I really wouldn’t have thought of that.

The key, though, seems to be pretty self-evident. Pimp your site out to everyone and anyone who might be interested. Encourage "word of mouth," as "word of mouth" in blogs is a VERY powerful thing, and boosts your Google juice, etc. Keep track of visitors and where they’re coming from– I’ve mentioned this here before, but I’m fairly obsessive about checking my click-throughs on my TypePad blogs, here. I use a couple other journaling and community sites, and when I’ve referred to stuff over here in those sites, I consistently see my click-throughs skyrocket in the following couple days. It’s kinda amazing to me– I don’t assume a lot of my non-academic friends are interested in what I have to say about something like china cabinets in the early republic, but my "lay" friends seem to click through just as much– if not more– than my on-line academic colleagues. (Although the union portion on the Venn Diagram of those two is pretty big– a sadly large number of my friends are academics.)

One strategy I noticed NOT noticing in the chapter– though I will admit I read it somewhat quickly, and may have missed it– is something that’s a little old-fashioned by web standards, but even more important than it was adopted as a practice– the "Links" page.

Most web pages have ’em. Your readers/viewers/audience/players/whatever who are most interested in your topic are going to be the most likely to use them. They provide instant connection to other sites. And there’s a netiquette standard quid pro quo, tit-for-tat quality of mutual addition. These pages are going to boost your Google juice, by making your page more frequently linked from and to. They’re going to bring over audiences– and the most intensely interested audiences– from other pages. And it’s a free, easy way to increase traffic.

I guess that thinking like this is pretty natural to me– as I’ve said in class, I’m pro- academic showmanship, I think of this whole deal more as a profession than as a higher calling (though there is that element, too), and, as I said above, I’m not afraid to be seen as a shameless self-promoter. As the beginning of the chapter indicates, the audience for history isn’t the biggest one– I mean honestly, a lot of days, I’d rather be reading comic books or going to see a concert myself. If we are ashamed as historians to make an honest plea for attention, to really argue for the interesting and compelling nature of our work, aren’t we sort of to blame if nobody looks at our research? And if you publish a monograph and nobody ever picks it up, what good are you really doing anyone?

___________________

Oh, and if anyone has any doubt as to the efficacy of Internet self-promotion, consider the case of the brilliant Terri Senft, an academic who works on Media Studies at the University of East London. She wrote her dissertation at NYU on LiveJournal and "Cam Girls," and put together a LiveJournal account herself, actually becoming her subject. When she announced recently that she had gotten a book deal on her dissertation, she had dozens of posts from LiveJournal "friends" saying that they planned on buying the book. So using the Internet to market yourself as an academic can work in your favor beyond just the simple matter of getting web traffic for your CLIO project.

(And everyone should check out Ms. Senft at any rate, ’cause she really is brilliant, and offers a lot of sage advise about academic practices, how to improve your writing, and lots of other good stuff.)

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Don’t believe the hype!

Okay, we’ve been hearing about Web 2.0 for a bit, now, and we all use sites and apps that fall under that rubric.  We’re there– or rather, we’re getting there.  A lot of websites are still quite Web 1.0 and still serve their purpose.

When I was reading through some of the readings this week, I was actually quite blown away at the resistance of some of these curators and historians to the idea of folksonomies and the import of memory.  Historical memory is, if anything, almost more important than historical fact, when you think about it– if an historical event becomes a totem or a fetish for particular national meanings, that’s its true significance.  It may not be "true," objectively, but it is true to those who believe it, etc. etc.  (I think this is sufficiently covered ground.)  And yet here are these professional public historians, worrying that the masses will misinterpret, or gloss over, the real truth…

Is there any real historical significance to the flag that inspired the national anthem?  Not really.  It’s only important ’cause people choose to interpret it as such.  Now, if you showed me the gun that shot Hitler or Lincoln*, you might have a real historical artifact– an object that actually was used by an historical actor to create change.  The flag that inspired a song?  That’s something I’m pretty comfortable letting the people decide on the import of, ’cause  without the people, let’s face it, that particular flag ain’t that important.

Seeing people in these traditional "gatekeeper" positions being reluctant to open up their institutions gave me a bad taste in my mouth.  I wanted to look to the new public history, empowered by web 2.o technologies, and see the future of public history– to see postmodern public history, where there are no grand narratives, and where contesting claims to truth can be flattened to a single plain, can coexist, can be presented so others can determine validity and use– or even seek to integrate them.

Then I looked at the examples we were given, and frankly, the reports of the museum-keeper’s demise at the hands of social networking technologies have been greatly exaggerated.  These sites were– I’ll be generous– pretty unimpressive.

Steve, the art museum social tagging experiment, is–despite its rather eccentric name, just plain boring.  There’s no real interactivity to it.  It just is a set of photos, and the "opportunity" for you to tag them.  Not being given any information on the pieces, I was frustrated– I recognized a decent number of the paintings, but couldn’t put my finger on them.  I ended up clicking away from the site quickly, feeling a bit stupid.  Plus, there was no indication of other tags people had come up with, or anything.  It felt a bit un-thought-out.

And then there was Every Object Tells a Story.  Frankly, no, it doesn’t.  And neither can most people, if the folks who submitted "stories" to this website are any indication.  There was too little explanation on many pieces, many pieces without pictures– I understand that you can’t actually HAVE a picture of Boo Radley’s house, but maybe that’s ’cause it’s not an OBJECT.  Why would you submit it to this site, especially if you had so little to say about it?  Then there were the people who suffered from the belief that they could write– the site is dripping with the worst kind of purple prose– writing so bad, I often couldn’t read it long enough to figure out what the object was, or why someone put it up.  And don’t get me started on the group response to the guy who posted his facial piercings, eliciting mostly aesthetic critiques, and a lot of misspelled four-letter words.  (Which leads me to a whole other rant about people who post things on line and can’t even spell the F-word correctly…)

Frankly, if these are the best examples one can provide for the creeping of social networking technology into public history, the fact that there’s even debate and discussion on the topic seems a bit pre-emptive.

______________________________

*Not that I’m equating the two men, just that they’re two men who made big historical decisions and got shot.

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Alternative Citations?

Someone sent me this link a couple weeks ago.

To be completely honest, I didn’t even realize it was a joke until the second entry.

The first one seemed completely commonsensical– of course you need a technique to cite graffiti. What if you’re working on a paper about, say, the use of Situationist graffiti in Paris in 1968. Or even a paper on contemporary graffiti– these things often get political or personal, they’re interesting and colorful, you could probably apply some of the same theories of anonymity and role-playing that people like Lisa Nakamura apply to the Internet. There’s some good papers there.

Only when I got to the method for properly citing a magic 8-ball or alien mind transmissions did I realize it was a joke. To be honest, I still like the idea of a citation format for graffiti or tattoos. I think they’re both things that one could find insight in. Maybe it’s just me, though.

But that experience got me to wonder about citations, and the role they play in our lives as students and academics. How much do we allow the people at the University of Chicago Press dictate what is or is not a valid object of academic work?

This is one of the challenges faced by anyone who does scholarly work on the Internet. The Chicago Manual of Style just has one catch-all category of "electronic source." When I was in college, I remember how excited the reference librarian got when he showed me the library’s first book that dealt with online citations.

Without an agreed-upon method of citing a source, the source itself is cast in a sort of shadow. If there’s no consensus about how to cite it, you open yourself up to battles between readers or editors about how to structure your citations that could leave your work in limbo while they thrust and perry. Some people are willing to take that chance, and they’re slowly starting to develop a consensus about certain questions of online citation, and opening up new questions… Should a blog post and an online newspaper really be cited the same way?

But there’s something deeper than all that going on here– how much do standards of citation unconsciously affect our decisions about what is or is not a valid object of scholarly research? It’s a difficult question to answer. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that standardized citation techniques do lend a certain amount of authority to certain types of texts. Might their absence do the opposite?

I was trolling around the Internet, and I couldn’t find much of anything on the history of standardized citation. Having done research that involved reading history books and literary criticism from the 1920s and earlier, I knew that the cult of MLA, APA, and Chicago (not to mention that radical Turabian splinter group) wasn’t always the monolith in academe it is today. In fact, back then, there seems to have been NO discipline-wide standardized citation technique.

Not that I’m saying that was a better situation– reading those sources can be a nightmare. It’s citation anarchy. If I had a dime for every time I encountered someone saying, "As Smith wrote in his diary," without clarifying who Smith was, whether his diary had ever been published, and if it hadn’t, where it could be accessed… well, I wouldn’t be a rich man, but I’d probably be a might happier. I would never advocate going back to those days, even if there are certain drawbacks to standardized citation as we know it today.

One thing I found that was interesting to me, however, was that (according to those all-knowing sages at wikipedia) the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style was published in 1906. This shocked me, because from my own personal observation, citation standardization didn’t really take off until the mid-century.

But then, I saw this: at the time, the title was  Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in
force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended
specimens of type in use. Rather than being a conscriptive standard set for all academics within a a certain set of disciplines, it was actually a guide to how to format things for the U of Chicago Press.

APA style first appeared as six pages of guidelines in The Psychological Bulletin in 1929, and the first edition of the manual was printed  in 1953. Similarly, somewhat later, the MLA first distributed a style sheet in 1951, and didn’t publish a manual until 1977. Obviously, the fifties were a time when the issue of standardization of style took on a new importance. I’d love to hear someone explain why. Also, it’s interesting that in all three cases, it really is the style itself that differs. The sorts of texts considered are fairly uniform. Is this perhaps a relic of fifties conservatism and fear of sticking out?

This is all rambling, and doesn’t really go anywhere. But I’d love to find more information and theories about how and why standardized citation came about when it did, and about when they were making the first decisions about what made the style-manual cut and what didn’t.

It’s all rather interesting to me.

If anyone reads this and has any books or articles to suggest, PLEASE comment.

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