Trading Places

It is only appropriate that the week of the fourth annual conference for US intellectual history that we announce a little change to the blog. Lauren and I will trade days; so starting next week her posts will appear on Wednesdays and mine on Fridays. I certainly appreciate the change.

Our colleague Andrew Hartman has been digging around at the NYPL today (a very luck guy, I think) and came across a curious piece from John Diggins. You can read his full post below this one. Andrew takes Diggins to task for dismissing cultural and social history. I wonder how much of Diggins's critique stemmed from where he made it. In other words, as I traveled from LaGuardia airport to Manhattan, I passed a Queens far different from the one my parents grew up in--the Irish and Polish replaced people from southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. Did Diggins discount the ability of academics to get a hold of the social history that swirled around him? As Andrew suggests, perhaps it comes down to a failure of imagination.