As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to … - Robert Darnton

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Quote of the day

When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.

Robert Darnton

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.

Book, Books, Communication, Revolutionary, Writing

Same Author Quotes

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

Bias, Harvard, Ideas, Literature, Philosophy

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.

1960S, England, Hit, Notion, Oxford, Time

The peasant of early modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed. The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short. This is why we need to reread Mother Goose.

Brutish, Lives, Mother, People, Way

My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.

Historical, Libraries, Library, Publishing, Taken, Ventures

In 2002, Google began an ambitious project to digitize every book in the world. It was intended as a search project: type in a query, and Google would show you snippets. They asked university libraries for books, which they would scan for free. At Harvard we didn't permit them to take works under copyright, but other libraries gave them everything.

Book, Books, Google, Library, Show