Word: historians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...historian Carl Friedrich once wrote, "To be an American is an ideal, while to be a Frenchman is a fact." A Frenchman knows what it means to be a Frenchman. Americans constantly wonder about themselves, about what they represent, about their purpose and their virtue and where they stand in the world. Americans are constantly reinventing themselves...
When not teaching, Solow and his wife Barbara, an economic historian at Boston University (they have two grown sons and a daughter), divide their time between a waterfront condominium in Boston and a summer house on Martha's Vineyard. At the Vineyard, a 24-ft. sailboat is Solow's primary passion. He plans to use part of his $340,000 Nobel Prize money to equip the boat with a new Genoa jib. "I've been just a poor academic up to now," he says, noting that the value of his only other major asset, his share of the M.I.T. pension...
There may be a dispute as to whether historians are too over specialized and law professors too polemical, but all can agree that every historian, law professor, physicist, and East Asian cultural scholar alike should be able to determine who eats where if seven co-workers eat lunch at one of three restraunts four days per week, subject to certain conditions, assuming that person one eats only at restaurant X on Wednesdays when he's with person four...
THAT THIS should be the case is not surprising. As the historian David M. Potter points out, unlike the biographer or the psychologist, the historian deals with people not as individuals but "in groups--in religious groups, in cultural groups, in ideological groups, in occupational groups, or in social groups." Theorists of social groups no doubt have useful insights for a historian...
Gertrude Himmelfarb recalls meeting a young historian who described his work as being on the "cutting edge of the discipline." He was writing one of those infinitely detailed studies of the inhabitants of a New England town in the late 18th century, their working conditions, their attitudes, their sex lives. Himmelfarb asked how he connected his work to the major event of that period, the creation of the U.S. "He conceded," she writes, "that from his themes and sources -- parish registers, tax rolls, census reports, legal records, polling lists, land titles -- he could not 'get to,' as he said...