The Journal of the History of Ideas Blog

Tag Microhistory

Sadie P. Delaney: Our Lady of Bibliotherapy

by contributing editor Brooke Palmieri The debate over whether reading is good or bad for your health is as old as the habit itself. In The Anatomy of Melancholy reading and scholarship sometimes cause, sometimes cure, Robert Burton’s depression; the… Continue Reading →

Mai-mai Sze and the I Ching

by contributing editor Erin McGuirl “What is the I Ching?” was the title of Eliot Weinberger’s recent review of two new translations of the I Ching. It’s an excellent question, and in his review he expertly summarizes the history of… Continue Reading →

Reestablishing Philosophy in a Destroyed Country: Karl Löwith’s Return to Germany

by guest contributor Mike Rottmann Almost one year after the end of war, on July 20, 1946, a leading executive of the Department of Education in the State of Baden sent a letter to the President of Heidelberg University: With… Continue Reading →

Friendship, Idealism, and Federating University Women in the Early Twentieth Century

by Emily Rutherford Working my way through my most recent archival findings, it’s tempting to conclude that, in early-twentieth-century England, men’s visions for the future of higher education revolved entirely around conservative retrenchment, while women’s embraced exciting new progressive ideas… Continue Reading →

Alice Ambrose and Life Unfettered by Philosophy in Wittgenstein’s Cambridge

by guest contributor David Loner As the first and only official post-graduate advisee of the celebrated Austrian thinker and Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alice Ambrose (1906-2001) typified in her 1932-38 Ph.D. course the complex social experience interwar upper-middle-class women underwent… Continue Reading →

Wilhelm Reich: A Disappointed Utopian

by guest contributor Zachary Levine What should we do when brilliant thinkers push their ideas in strange directions? Should we try to interpret their later work in the context of their earlier work, or vice versa? Should we reject their… Continue Reading →

The “Conquest of the Sun” and Ideas about Energy

by contributing editor Carolyn Taratko In late summer of 1878, a visitor strolling the park at Trocadéro on a sunny day during the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris would have encountered an enormous silver-plated cone. Twenty-four square meters of reflective… Continue Reading →

Moses Gaster: Folklore, ‘Medieval’ Judaism and Turn-of-the-Century Jewish Historiography

by guest contributor Yitzchak Schwartz Historians have a very specific idea of how Jewish intellectuals understood their history at the turn of the twentieth century. Most see Jewish historiography of the period as centered around the German Wissenschaft des Judentums… Continue Reading →

Lincoln Kirstein, Dance, and Intellectual History

by guest contributor Laura Quinton Last week, New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts hosted a panel, “Dance and the Intellectual: Lincoln Kirstein’s Legacy.” The event featured moderator Leon Wieseltier, former literary editor of the New Republic, along… Continue Reading →

Global Microhistory: One or Two Things That I Know About It

by guest contributor Maryam Patton Where does the local fabric of human life stand in the great heights of global history? Consider Jürgen Osterhammel’s discussion of travel literature and the growth of exploration in his titanic The Transformation of the… Continue Reading →

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