A lexander B evilacqua and F rederic C lark , editors. Thinking in the Past Tense

In the words of the editors of Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations, Alexander Bevilacqua and Frederic Clark, “the history of ideas has become intellectual history” (2), a field in which thoughts, beliefs, and ideas are examined as phenomena that emerge from a substrate of people: their social relations, political infrastructure, experiences, and interactions with landscape. Most historians no longer view ideas as springing from the minds of solitary geniuses. Instead, they understand ideas to be inextricable from their contexts, which they, in turn, shape anew. Thinking in the Past Tense records conversations with eight historians who have shaped the cultural and anthropological turns in intellectual history since the 1960s: Ann M. Blair, Lorraine Daston, Benjamin Elman, Anthony Grafton, Jill Kraye, Peter N. Miller, Jean-Louis Quantin, and Quentin Skinner. By asking these scholars to reflect on their trajectories, methods, scholarly agendas, and hopes for the field’s future,...

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