Select answers from Michael Hattem, author of Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution

Q: How much of the “authority of the past” can be traced to the rise of the precedent-based system of the common law in England in the 17th Century? (Thomas Lincoln)

A: A good deal of it, Thomas. I talk in my first and second chapters about the cultural impact of living in a common law legal system and John Demos and others have noted that the common law was more than just a legal system and that it seeped out into the cultures of England and British North America generally.

Q: Where did slavery and the slave trade fit in the early Americans’ reinterpretation of their British past? How was their view consistent (or not) with the ideology of the early republic? (Anonymous)

A: That is a great question. The slave trade, like slavery itself, was often left out of colonial and later national histories, partly because they did not fit with the themes of unity and independence so prominent in the early national historical narrative. That said, some Americans, especially those inclined toward antislavery, did see fit to blame the slave trade on Britain, and some, by extension, slavery in the colonies, just as Jefferson did in his first draft of the Declaration.

Q: I'm hearing an interesting parallel between the crafting of the "Colonial Creed" to separate the American identity from England and the post Civil War crafting of the Lost Cause narrative, and perhaps the later reunification of nation by describing it as an unfortunate battle of brother with brother. There was also in this a stressing of continuity, eradicating slavery as a factor, between pre war and post war society. (Ana Edwards)

A: Fascinating question and relevant to my next book project! Whenever political crises create a need for new historical narratives or history cultures, the question of continuity and rupture is one of the first that must be resolved and how that gets resolved depends on the political goals and circumstances of those creating the narrative. Confederates who believed they had to secede to protect their liberty (i.e., the ability to enslave human beings) drew analogies between themselves and the revolutionary generation who they argued fought to preserve their British liberties. The Lost Cause, as an attempt to manufacture a post-facto narrative to justify loss perhaps has more in common with loyalist histories of the period that sought to explain the loss of the colonies in a way that not only reconciled the past with the present but also as a roadmap for the future of the empire.

Q: Have you encountered the argument by Prof. Kermit Roosevelt of Penn’s law school that “created equal” had a different meaning when it was written than we understand it? Roosevelt posits that the original meaning was merely a restatement of Lockean anti-Stuart social contract theory: that we are born equal and we die equal and that, in between, we consent to government. He further posits that our sense of the Declaration as an “equality” document is a product of Lincoln-era propaganda. Thoughts? (Thomas Lincoln)

A: I have not encountered that argument from Dr. Roosevelt specifically but the late Michal Jan Rozbicki wrote a book ten years ago called Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution in which he argued that liberty in the eighteenth century was defined in no small part by the privileges one had that were denied to others. In other words, what made liberty meaningful to those who had it was partly that others did not. Equality in that context takes on a very different meaning that would seem to be along the lines of your description of Dr. Roosevelt’s work.

Q: In 1848, a correspondent to Frederick Douglass’ Paper pointed to a reference to Crispus Attucks in the popular history of the American Revolution by Italian historian Carlo Botta. Did any widely read history by an American acknowledge the role of Blacks in the revolution by the mid-1800s? (Kenneth Hawkins)

A: Botta’s history was published in 1809. At that time, the early histories of the Revolution did not mention Attucks. His role in the Revolution and in the memory of it was largely a product of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s-1850s, especially William C. Nell, a black abolitionist in Boston who wrote often about Attucks and managed a number of campaigns to get Attucks remembered and commemorated, efforts which he continued in the years before the Centennial in 1876.

Q: Given one of the earliest histories written was by Mercy Otis Warren, how did women fit into the stories that appeared after the Revolution? (Benjamin Park)

A: In addition to Warren, there were only a few other women who published historical works before the War of 1812. In the stories and narratives of the Revolution, they barely existed at all. It’s not until the mid-nineteenth century that we begin to see significant numbers of women writing history (detailed well in Mary Kelley’s work) but also the first history of women in the Revolution by Elizabeth Ellet in 1848-50.

Q: You noted history culture could be found in places like newspapers and almanacs and not just books. Were the post-Revolutionary writers angry that their historical works were published in these places, or did they want their work to appear there to have a bigger impact? (David Gary)

A: They definitely wanted their work excerpted and some were happy to see theirs serialized primarily because their explicit goal in writing history was to shape a new American national identity. That said, the thing they feared as authors who funded their own publications was the emergence of pirated editions of their books coming back to the United States from England and Ireland. These pirated copies often arrived very quickly and they were much cheaper than the original editions paid for by the authors. Publishing a work of history was a significant expense (Ramsay details his financial losses from his histories in letters to younger historians asking for advice about publishing) and many of the revolutionary generation’s historians never made any money and in many cases lost money from publishing their histories.

Q: I would like to ask specifically about the appropriation of indigeneity to form an American identity. He's talked a little about it, and wrote about it on pages 25-35, but I was wondering if he could go more in depth on the impact of this phenomenon on the systemic oppression/genocide of indigenous people in the US? (Kylie Hoang)

A: This is a really important question. I talk about this more in chapter six of the book but the cultural nationalists’ construction of an Indigenous past for the new nation that absolved its citizens of the historical actions of their ancestors, at the same time, justified the continuance, in the new national context, of the settler colonialism that would continue to define the nation’s imperial continental ambitions throughout the nineteenth century. So much as the expansion and growth of the United States rested in part on the appropriation of Indigenous lands, so too did the idea of “American history” and development of American national identity rest in part on the appropriation of Indigenous pasts. In other words, cultural forms of settler colonialism like appropriating Indigenous pasts helped allow early national Americans to justify the political forms of settler colonialism which were pursued by their government and which they supported.

Q: Along with this view of the revolutionaries view of their history, there was the view expressed in Mather's Magnalia. During the war, works such as Dwight's Conquest of Canaan and Ezra Stiles, America was part of providential history, a position that continues in the concept of Manifest Destiny. How does this historical vision relate to what you describe? (Robert Imholt)

A: This was an important debate in the previous literature on the topic of American historical writing that came out around the Bicentennial. The question was: how much did the early national histories reflect the Enlightenment and reject providentialism as a force of historical change. Some historians back then argued that early national historians rejected providentialism in favor of a more enlightened perspective. What I found was that though they were not as explicit about providentialism as Mather, there was still a sense of an underlying providentialism in their narratives.

Q: I just received my copy of the current American Historical Review roundtable of Jill Lepore’s These Truths. This follows on the release of the 1776 Commission report by one president and cancellation by the incoming president. How do we go about creating a new national narrative today? (Peter Feinman)

A: I have thought about this question a lot in thinking about the contemporary relevance of my work and thinking about national memory. My current project looks at the history of the memory of the Revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries and what I’ve found is that American history became politicized in a distinctly partisan way after 1800 and has been that way ever since. There has never been a time outside the window of the 1790s and early 1800s when there were not competing national narratives and memories. In other words, I do not think it is possible to create a new national narrative that could be widely accepted. Of course, one of the challenges there is that doing so would have to contend with the very powerful resilience of the Cold War-era memory that many American adults grew up with. All that said, I think we are currently in an important moment in the history of the memory of the American Revolution. Conflict over American history seems to ebb and flow along with the degree of political division in the country. Not unlike in the 1760s and 1770s, many Americans today are reconsidering the meaning and legacy of the Revolution. What is somewhat new is that many are calling for it to have no place in our collective civic and political cultures. I do not know if there is a way to create a national narrative with broad appeal in the present but I think that if it were possible it would require avoiding the two extremes we see so often currently of either seeing the Revolution as all good or all bad. What makes American history so interesting to me as a historian is its complexity and both of those extremes tend to flatten American history into two dimensions.

Q: Some educated Americans before 1800 had read in the Greek and Latin classics. Was not the Roman past some part of the American past before about 1810? Was not Gibbon read in your early America?  (Thomas Bisson)

A: I did not address classical history in the book for two reasons. First, there is already a ton of literature on this topic, some quite old and some quite new. But second, and more importantly, the number of Americans who knew anything substantive about the classical past was very small, especially compared to those who knew anything modestly substantive about recent British or English history. I wanted to get beyond just elites and to get a sense of what ordinary colonists and later Americans knew about the past and how it contributed to their civic identities and political behaviors. My decision to do this was confirmed early on when I noticed during reading newspapers and pamphlets from the imperial crisis that pseudonyms of British historical figures were often just as commonly used as those from classical figures.

Q: How does Noah Webster’s effort to distinguish an American language from an English one fit into the notion of turning from one historical narrative to create another? (David Greer)

A: Americans created a deep national past by making Columbus the discoverer of America, nationalizing natural history, and appropriating Indigenous pasts for the purpose of establishing a sense of historical independence from Britain and Webster’s linguistic efforts sought to establish a sense of cultural independence from Britain. Both were part of the broader project of establishing a new national identity after securing political independence.

Q: How do you deal in your narrative with the many European settlers who were not British, but Dutch or Swedish or Moravian. Did they relate to this tradition of parliament and King? And what about the Proprietary colonies as opposed to the Royal colonies? (David Crosby)

A: This is a great question! It is true that the colonies had significant ethnic diversity. For those who did not have British ethnic identities, within a generation or so of coming to the colonies they and their descendants quickly developed British civic identities, often while retaining their distinct ethnic identities. In other words, to think of oneself as a British subject (regardless of ethnic origins) was to also think of oneself as an inheritor and beneficiary of the history that made Britain the most powerful empire in the world by 1763.

Q: Can you talk about how history was taught in schools and in colleges in the English Colonies from 1620 to 1776? For your hypothesis to be correct, I would expect to see changes in the curriculum. (Manu Radhakrishnan)

A: That is a great question but history was not often taught in schools either before or after 1776. Schools in this period, from grammar schools to academies to colleges, were based on the classical liberal model which focused on grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students were expected to read history on their own time, but they did not have history courses and curriculums until well into the nineteenth century. Part of what I did in chapters 1 and 2 was to look into college library catalogues and how they changed over time.

Q: In your opinion, did Thomas Paine's writings in any meaningful way affect how Americans thought of the origins of their historical experience? (Edward Dodson)

A: I tried to offer a new take on Paine’s Common Sense based on understanding the imperial crisis through this lens of history culture in the book’s “Interlude.” Basically, I think Paine’s book and his arguments were so appealing partly because they allowed many American colonists a temporary way out of the disconnect between them and Britain, whereby they cared about the authority of the past and believed the British did not. Paine’s arguments effectively told them, forget about all that and instead worry about beginning the world anew.” He painted such a critical picture of the English past partly as a way of getting the colonists to disown it instead of constantly and futilely appealing to it. But once the war ended, the past quickly regained its previous cultural importance and it only increased in the decades after the war.

The recipient of the American Philosophical Society’s 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science is Jessica Riskin, Professor of History at Stanford University, in recognition of her book The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

In this ambitious and elegant book, Jessica Riskin argues that although the dominant understanding of mechanism is passive (even a clock must be wound up in order to tick), there is also a competing view of mechanism as active, enspirited, having its source of motion within it—to borrow a term from Liebniz, a “restless clock.” Mechanistic thinkers could empty nature of agency because God had set it all in motion. Yet the rise of naturalistic science left no place for divinity. Riskin traces the centuries-long struggle to banish agency from scientific explanation in favor of a passive view of nature’s machinery, while showing how this effort remained both incomplete and futile. In doing so, she boldly recasts the old vitalist-mechanist debate as a contradiction that grew out of the successive revolutionary ideas of the Reformation and Enlightenment. These were not mere abstractions; Riskin shows how the paradox became materialized, in automata, cells, robots, eggs, AI, and epigenetics. She makes a persuasive case that the early scientific attributions of action and purpose to God still haunt naturalistic explanations. No matter how rigorous and naturalistic, scientists still find the language of biological agency useful, even indispensable. In the end, as Riskin makes clear, the old tension between mechanism and purpose remains with us, and that is not a bad thing for science.

The Patrick Suppes Prize honors accomplishments in three deeply significant scholarly fields, with the prize rotating each year between philosophy of science, psychology or neuroscience, and history of science. The history of science prize is awarded for an outstanding book in history of science appearing within the preceding six years.  The works considered for the prize are restricted to works that emphasize detailed analysis of important systematic findings in any branch of science, ancient or modern, using quantitative and mathematical methods.

The selection committee was Ruth Schwartz Cowan (chair), Janice and Julian Bers Professor Emerita, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania; Babak Ashrafi, President, Chief Executive Officer, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; Mahzarin R. Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Angela N. H. Creager, Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science, Chair, Department of History, Princeton University; Noel M. Swerdlow, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics and of History, University of Chicago, Visiting Professor, California Institute of Technology; Susan Wolf, Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Harriet Zuckerman, Professor of Sociology Emerita, Columbia University; and the committee was put together by Richard Shiffrin, Distinguished Professor, Luther Dana Waterman Professor, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Indiana University.
 

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The recipient of the 2020 Henry Allen Moe Prize is Judge David S. Tatel in recognition of his paper “Separation of Powers and Statutory Interpretation: A Battle Hidden in Plain Sight” read at the American Philosophical Society’s 2019 April Meeting and published in its Proceedings Volume 163, Number 3, September 2019.  David S. Tatel is the Senior United States Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.  The 2020 Moe Prize was presented at the Society's November 2022 Meeting.

Of the separation of powers, James Madison wrote in Federalist 47: that “No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty.” With this constitutional principle, instilled in every citizen from childhood, Judge David S. Tatel opens his elegant paper “Separation of Powers and Statutory Interpretation: A Battle Hidden in Plain Sight.” Declining political debate, Judge Tatel guides the reader succinctly through the arcane thicket of statutory interpretation. Unpacking the significance of the 1984 Supreme Court Chevron decision (more often cited than understood), he explains that it is not the decision itself which is of the greatest importance (although he does explain its impact), but rather the way that the “Chevron two-step” has brought about the passage of decision-making power, in effect law-making powers, to a vast range of Federal government agencies. Scrupulously avoiding interpretive partiality, Judge Tatel presents a model argument that is clear, logical, and compelling. He expresses some real concern that this transfer of power has considerably expanded the regulatory powers of new parts of the government well beyond anything envisaged by the Framers of the Constitution. Such concern has been expressed in several Supreme Court decisions summarized here by Judge Tatel, but these have not yet amounted to a redress of the balance of authority among Congress, the courts and the agencies.  This deft and plain spoken, yet subtle essay instructs the citizen reader on the often hidden, prolonged constitutional debate over the extent to which important and regular aspects of the lives of Americans are governed not by the executive branch (directly, at least), by their elected representatives, or even by the courts.  Hidden in plain sight, in Judge Tatel’s words, is the continuing struggle “to keep our three branches of government ‘separate and distinct.’”

Established in 1982 by a gift from the widow of Henry Allen Moe to honor the longtime head of the Guggenheim Foundation and president of the American Philosophical Society from 1959 to 1970. It pays particular tribute to his firm commitment to the humanities and those who pursue them. The Moe Prize is awarded annually to the author of a paper in the humanities or jurisprudence read at a Meeting of the Society.

The selection committee was Elizabeth Cropper, chair, Dean Emerita, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; Michael McCormick, Goelet Professor of Medieval History, Harvard University; and Brent D. Shaw, Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics Emeritus, Princeton University.
 

The recipient of the 2021 Magellanic Premium Medal is Sara Seager.  Sara Seager is a theoretical astrophysicist and leader in the exciting field of exoplanets, particularly in the quest to discover and analyze habitable planets beyond the solar system.  The citation inscribed on the medal is “For theoretical work that led to the first detection of exoplanet atmospheres.” The 2021 Magellanic Premium was presented at the Society's November 2022 Meeting.

Sara Seager is known for her work on exoplanet atmospheres and interiors; her modeling led to the first detection of an exoplanet atmosphere.  She was the Deputy Director of Science for NASA’s TESS satellite, which to date has discovered 66 new exoplanets, all close enough to be imaged and searched for signatures of life. Her current research focuses on the bio-signatures in the atmospheres of potential life-bearing planets that could be used to discover evidence for extraterrestrial life.  She is a Professor of Physics, Professor of Planetary Science, and a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she holds the Class of 1941 Professor Chair. Her books include Exoplanet Atmospheres: Physical Processes, 2010, Exoplanets, 2010, and The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, 2020.

Born in Toronto, Canada, she received her B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto in 1994.  Dr. Seager did her Ph.D. work at Harvard where she developed theoretical models for atmospheres of exoplanets. Her honors include the Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society, a MacArthur fellowship, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society (elected 2018).

The award was established from a gift of 200 guineas by John Hyacinth de Magellan, of London, in 1786, “for a gold medal to be awarded from time to time under prescribed terms, to the author of the best discovery or most useful invention relating to navigation, astronomy, or natural philosophy (mere natural history only excepted).”  The medal, named the Magellanic Premium, was first awarded in 1790.   It is the oldest medal recognizing scientific achievements given by a North American institution.

The selection committee members were Gordon Baym (chair), Professor Emeritus, Research Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Marvin Cohen, University Professor of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, Senior Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; Jeremiah Ostriker, Professor of Astronomy, Columbia University, Professor Emeritus of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; and Michael Turner, Director, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago.

The 2018 Magellanic Premium medal was awarded to Fabiola Gianotti “for her role in the discovery of the Higgs boson and her leadership in elementary particle physics.  From the design and construction of the ATLAS detector to the analysis of the data and discovery of the Higgs, Gianotti played a leading role in this milestone event. Today she serves as the Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and is leading the quest to understand matter, energy, space and time at the most fundamental level.”  The medal is engraved “for the discovery of the Higgs boson and leadership in high energy physics.”

The presentation of the prize took place at the Society's virtual April 2021 Meeting.  In the video of the award ceremony above, APS president Linda Greenhouse introduces the prize and the chair of the prize selection committee, Gordon Baym, presents the prize to her.  In her acceptance speech Dr. Gianotti discusses the significance of the relationship between the humanities and sciences and provides thought provoking insight about the idea of "useful knowledge" and the purpose of pure scientific investigation.  For instance, scientific investigation pursued purely for the sake of curiosity and knowledge may have appeared useless to society at the time, but generations later led to the development of transistors, GPS, and other advances that have had a profound impact on society today.

Fabiola Gianotti is an experimental elementary particle physicist. As the Spokesperson of ATLAS, one of the major experiments at CERN, Gianotti led one of the two, 3000-member teams that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. The discovery of the Higgs was recognized by a Nobel Prize for the theory, but none for the experiment.  Her involvement in the Higgs discovery began with the design and building of the 7000-ton ATLAS detector with its almost 100 million readout channels and continued through the physics analysis that led to the actual discovery.  As CERN DG, she is shaping the global future of the field whose modest mission is a fundamental understanding of matter, energy, space and time.  Gianotti, a Foreign Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and an International Member of the American Philosophical Society, also trained as a classical pianist at the Milan Conservatory.

From a gift of 200 guineas by John Hyacinth de Magellan, of London, in 1786, for a gold medal to be awarded from time to time under prescribed terms, to the author of the best discovery or most useful invention relating to navigation, astronomy, or natural philosophy (mere natural history only excepted).  The medal, named the Magellanic Premium, was first awarded in 1790.   It is the oldest medal recognizing scientific achievements given by a North American institution.

The selection committee members were Gordon Baym, Professor Emeritus, Research Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Marvin Cohen, University Professor of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, Senior Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; Jeremiah Ostriker, Professor of Astronomy, Columbia University, Professor Emeritus of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; and Michael Turner, Director, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago.

This bibliographic database will include the works of such figures as George Washington, John Adams, John Jay, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, as well as dozens of lesser-known though important scholars and thinkers in the early American republic. The database will, ultimately, document the development of early American science and intellectual life. For this resource, we push educators to ask themselves the following question before and after exploring the project: what objectives can you achieve by having students work with a bibliography?

We hope this resource will be of use in pushing bibliographies beyond a check-point assignment in your classrooms and provide inspiration for both you and your students. We’ve found that thinking about this bibliography in particular provides good notes on constructing bibliographies-as-assignments, new research tips and opportunities, and a variety of new perspectives.

This public-facing digital project is creating a database to document many of the most generative works and authors in the Atlantic world—including reprints and editions in any language—produced by Members elected to the American Philosophical Society (APS) between 1743 and 1865. This is no small task: APS Members were the who’s who of thinkers during the rise of natural philosophy and science, medical inquiry, and ethnography. Many of these early Members had deep connections to the American Revolution and the early republic. 

Like any bibliography, this project started by gathering information about the publications needed or used. In this case, Fellow Jeff Appelhans (among other APS Fellows), drew together records from the public catalog of major historical libraries to see what our Member authors published. By drawing together records from the British Library’s English Short Title Catalog, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, with APS holdings—and the vast foreign-language holdings cataloged in WorldCat—the project’s managers aspire to comprehensive coverage. The process and large scope taught a few lessons that can relate to smaller bibliographies. 

Consider some of the big hits of the period covered in the project. For example, searching for famous Member Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, would result in a flood of results. Thus, the first considerations in a large (or small scale bibliography): scope of the project. As the early modern print revolution spun up, the boom of multiple editions alone could grind a project like this to a halt. When assigning large bibliographies or research projects, consider the scope of the project and the amount of available information. The time period covered should also go into consideration. Make sure learners know if they should be looking for editions within certain years or if any edition will do. The more narrow you as an educator can make the search, the easier for learners. Staying up to date on projects like this from classroom allies like the APS can help inspire research projects, trips, and other assignments. 

When it comes to research for students and ourselves, Wikipedia is a common go-to starting location. This bibliography also contains many facets contained in a Wikipedia article: additional resources (the bibliography itself), small biographies, and a sense of historical connections. The biographies are vetted by staff at the APS, as content in Wikipedia is vetted, but these biographies are smaller and usually clock-in at around 250 words. The connections seen in this bibliography are slightly different as well. Instead of seeing paragraphs about the context of, let’s say George Washington’s Farewell Address, students will see the history of and media of publication and use of the Address. Additionally, the resources listed in this bibliography provide the same jumping points that a Wikipedia article might. Imagine what questions might be provoked! 

Just as Wikipedia is a comfortable research go-to, manuscripts (hand-written materials) tend to be a comfortable primary source go-to. There is no doubting the power of a hand-written letter to connect students to history and historical figures on an intimate and empathetic scale. But there’s an equal and slightly different power that comes with published materials which can provide a new perspective on how we use primary sources. Let’s go back to George Washington’s Farewell Address. If you typically use a copy from 1800 as your primary source and compare that to this bibliography, the explorations of this document can change. Why were so many copies printed in 1800? What of the locations? Each of those copies is an individual primary source that shows a larger cultural network and narrative than a single manuscript might reveal. Taking a step back onto that larger scale, think about the bibliography’s display of locations and years. The Republic of Letters, the Enlightenment—both happened via the exchange of printed and manuscript materials together. This bibliography allows you to track that exchange in a networked, birds-eye view. Again, imagine what questions that might provoke! 

A bibliography is not as flashy as a virtual exhibition. But, as our thinking about uses of the bibliography deepened, there was an excitement that built up around its possible applications and the spin-off thoughts. Think about the definition of “bibliography.” Compare and contrast the surprisingly broad definition to how you use bibliographies in the classroom. There’s a reason National History Day assigns them and scholars so heavily use them. There’s a comparison to be made to popular book lists like the New York Times’ “Best-seller List” and this bibliography. That comparison and novel (possibly more interesting and enriching) uses of bibliographies rely on a reframing of those objectives we asked you to think about in the beginning.

Resources like this take more creative work but are always worth exploring. There are questions, ideas, concepts, activities, that can be discovered if we push to think outside of the usual assignments.  From how to construct a complex, comprehensive bibliography to exploring Enlightenment era exchange, we invite you to join the APS Library & Museum in rethinking the dusty bibliography!

Written by APS Fellow Dr. Jeff Appelhans and Mike Madeja, Head of Education Programs