Investigations of a Dog

Yesterday I went to the Institute of Historical Research to hear Peter Burke talking about “Strengths and Weaknesses of Cultural History 1980-2006″. Judging by how full the Pollard room was this was a major event. I thought I might be out of my depth there, but as it turned out I didn’t hear anything that surprised me or that I couldn’t understand. The paper was a very general overview of cultural history which did pretty much what the title suggests. I can’t remember all the points because I wasn’t taking notes, but most of the suggested strengths and weaknesses were fairly obvious. I didn’t take part in the discussion at the time because it was already going on long enough and I wanted to get away (and also didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking stupid questions of course!), but other people asked some interesting questions. This post was going to be an attempt to summarise the paper, but it went off on various tangents.

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Oh no! Bill Turkel has tagged me for a meme! Is this the end of civilisation as we know it? When I started this weblog I was determined to stick to substantial original content. There would be no room for memes or other self-indulgent timewasting — I already have a LiveJournal for that. However, Bill managed to turn this particular meme into some interesting analysis of memetics and the blogosphere. That’s inspired me to move even further away from the original meme and post some random thoughts about memes. I won’t be tagging anyone at the end, because I hope to demonstrate that history bloggers don’t need to tag each other.

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