Readers of this blog may have asked themselves what the image identifying the Learning by the Book contributions shows. At first glance, the photo simply contains a row of worn, bound, heavy handbooks on a library shelf. The books are arguably very European and modern; however, they convey an aspect of “bookish” materiality that many of the contributions to this blog, regardless of time period or region, deal with in quite diverse ways. Continue reading “The Politics of the Handbook”
Author: Mathias Grote
Assistant professor (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) in the History of Science at the Humboldt University of Berlin
Who Has Been to Ames, Iowa? Or: Handbooks as an Unappreciated Dimension of Science
When I told my colleagues in Germany and the United States where I was heading for archival research two years ago, people looked at me completely baffled, or even in compassion. Some also laughed. Historians of science, they seemed to imply, travel to Ivy League universities for archival research, to Oxbridge, Paris, or Berlin. What could there be of interest in the library of an agricultural school in corn country?
Why Manuals and Handbooks? Why Now?
In one month, an international group of almost 40 scholars will convene at Princeton for four days to discuss manuals and handbooks. We—Angela Creager, Elaine Leong, Kerstin von der Krone, and Mathias Grote, aka the organizers—are absolutely thrilled about what will be a great event to explore a novel field of study, straddling continents and ages, bringing together our field, the history of science/knowledge, with the history of the book and media. In posts added to this blog in the coming weeks, we aim to get the ball rolling among our participants and visitors, but we’d also like to start a conversation with everybody interested in this subject—not least since we received more than 150 applications to our conference and were not able to accommodate many promising proposals. So consider this a little virtual conference before the conference.