It's important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library.

The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet.

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

It's important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library.

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.

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.

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.