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.

I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.

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.

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.

The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st.

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.