From 1827 to 1831 the German historian Leopold von Ranke travelled through Germany, Austria, and Italy, hunting for documents and archives. During this journey Ranke developed a new model for historical research that transformed the archive into the most important site for the production of historical knowledge. Within the archive, Ranke claimed, the trained historian could forget his personal predispositions and political loyalties, and write objective history. This essay critically examines Ranke's model for historical research through a study of the obstacles, frustrations, and joys that he encountered on his journey. It shows how Ranke's archival experiences inspired him to re-evaluate his own identity as a historian and as a human being, and investigates some of the affiliations between his model for historical research and the political realities of Prince Metternich's European order. Finally, the essay compares Ranke's historical discipline to other nineteenth-century disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology.

The apparently distinct aesthetic values of naturalism (a fidelity to external appearance) and neoclassicism (with its focus on idealization and intangible essence) came together in creative tension and fusion in much late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century sculptural theory and practice. The hybrid styles that resulted suited the requirements of the European sculpture-buying public. Both aesthetics, however, created difficulties for the German Idealists who represented a particularly uncompromising strain of Romantic theory. In their view, naturalism was too closely bound to the observable, familiar world, while neoclassicism was too wedded to notions of clearly defined forms. This article explores sculptural practice and theory at this time as a site of complex debates around the medium's potential for specific concrete representation in a context of competing Romantic visions (ethereal, social and commercial) of modernity.

The last couple of decades has brought a renewed interest in American conservatism among historians. Yet most recent studies have focused on the emergence of neoconservatism after World War II and virtually no recent scholarly work has pursued the history of conservatism before the 1920s. Both Richard Hofstadter and Clinton Rossiter agreed that the late nineteenth century was an important watershed in the evolution of American conservative thought. Hofstadter argued that the new laissez-faire conservatism that became dominant during the Gilded Age was remarkable in that “it lacked many of the signal characteristics of conservatism as it is usually found.” Yet some conservatives refused to accept key features of what Clinton Rossiter once branded this new “contradictory conservatism.” This essay focuses mostly on Protestant clerical intellectuals (both Northern and Southern) who dissented from the new orthodoxy and attempted to preserve older conservative principles. Against the laissez-faire conservatives' hyperindividualism, these dissenting conservatives stressed an organic view of the social order and the importance of mediating institutions such as family and church. To the others' secularism, they offered a social theory suffused with evangelical Protestantism. This analysis highlights where these dissidents differed from their fellow conservatives and seeks also to elucidate their alternative conservative vision of the American republic. Such a study serves to clarify just how profound an ideological shift occurred among conservatives during the Gilded Age and illuminates some of the persistent tensions within American conservatism still evident today.

No philistine, Thorstein Veblen thought humankind's innate impulse to imbue experience with aesthetic unity advanced all knowledge, and that the most beautiful objects, ideas, and actions met a standard of communal benefit reflecting humanity's naturally selected sociability. Though German idealism was an early influence, it clashed with Veblen's historicist critique of Western institutions, and it was William James's psychology that refined his ideas into a coherent aesthetics with ethical and political applications, by clarifying how instinct, habit, and environment could interact to institutionalize standards of beauty subverting the native altruism of the aesthetic impulse. Over years of association with John Dewey, Veblen concluded that a redeemed and reflective will to behold and create beauty in and through selfless activity could advance a more efficient and egalitarian society, and that humans cooperatively shaping their environments for the common good could approximate the German tradition's ideal of harmonizing personal freedom and external reality.

“God knows,” lamented the physicist Isidor Rabi, “I'm not the simplest person, but compared to Oppenheimer, I'm very, very simple.” J. Robert Oppenheimer played myriad roles in the science and politics of modern America: as a physicist working to establish a synthetic American school uniting theoretical and experimental approaches; as a government functionary and “weaponeer” piloting the development and fine-tuning the deployment of the first atomic bombs; as insider, consultant, and oracle speaking in the name of American science; but also as outsider, voice of conscience, and political pariah.

In recent years, the historiography of Nazi Germany has taken what Neil Gregor has called a “voluntarist turn.” By this, Gregor means that the recent literature on Nazi Germany has emphasized “that the panoply of organizations actively involved in occupation and murder, the number of German men and women who actively participated in these crimes, and the range of places in which they committed them, was much, much greater than has hitherto been acknowledged.” In the first instance this voluntarist turn has meant an increased stress on the centrality of Nazi criminality and atrocity to the regime, not as one feature, but as the central characteristic, of the Third Reich. Alongside this, however, has come an increased insistence that these criminal policies were both widely known at the time and broadly popular among Germans. As Saul Friedländer has put it, “the everyday involvement of the population with the regime was far deeper than has long been assumed, due to the widespread knowledge and passive acceptance of the crimes, as well as the crassest profit derived from them.” In short, then, the most recent trend among historians of the Third Reich is to insist that people believed in the Nazi project, including its criminal aspects.

The Orwell centenary of 2003 has come and gone, but the pace of academic publications that usually accompany such biographical milestones has not slackened. The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell was released in summer 2007, John Rodden's Every Intellectual's Big Brother: George Orwell's Literary Siblings was published in 2006, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future, the proceedings of a 1999 conference, came out in 2005. The striking thing about many of these publications, not to mention the ones which emerged out of the commemorative activities of 2003 itself, is that they are more concerned with Orwell's reputation and relevance today than with his oeuvre as such. As many as five chapters of the Cambridge Companion have a “posthumous” focus; the proceedings of the largest centenary conference, George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century, raise the issue of Orwell and the war in Iraq more frequently than that of Orwell and World War II.The latter is not entirely surprising for an American conference which featured the “liberal hawk” and former Trotskyist journalist Christopher Hitchens as the keynote speaker, and whose proceedings were edited in accordance with a corresponding political agenda, but it is also indicative of a larger phenomenon, a phenomenon most thoroughly examined by John Rodden in books like George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation and Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell. Few imaginative writers have been so compulsively remoulded, coopted, and invoked outside of their proper literary sphere; as Rodden's scrupulous documentation shows, no modern crisis from the Cold War to the war on terror has gone by without an Orwell headline to define it. What, one may ask, are the mechanisms behind this astounding popularity? How are reputations on this vast scale made? Looking at “the writer and his work” will only get one so far; one must also look outward, for the world's perception of Orwell is as interesting and intriguing a subject as Orwell himself. Rodden, the most prolific Orwell critic publishing today, has made this reception history his focus.

For three centuries now, John Milton and John Locke have been hailed as heroic advocates of religious freedom. Securely ensconced in the pantheon of liberal icons, they continue to be enlisted in the cause of liberty. In the wake of 9/11, a number of writers have retold the tale of how enlightened progressives rescued the West from the forces of theocratic repression. Milton and Locke loom large in that story. They have starring roles in Perez Zagorin's study of How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (2003), and they feature prominently as “two champions of liberty” in the philosopher A. C. Grayling's book Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West (2007). Whig history is not dead yet. Indeed, Grayling is refreshingly honest about his old-fashioned liberalism—in the British edition, his book's dust jacket is laid out like the title page of a nineteenth-century pamphlet: “By Mr. A. C. Grayling. London. Printed in the Year 2007”.

In 1975 the Clarendon Press at Oxford published Peter Nidditch's edition of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. In his Introduction Nidditch says that his edition “offers a text that is directly derived, without modernization, from the early published versions; it notes the provenance of all its adopted readings (some of which are new, correcting long-established errors); and it aims at recording all relevant differences between these versions”. As Nidditch goes on to acknowledge, the “relevant differences” were many, “requiring several thousand registrations both in the case of material variants (deletions, additions, or changes of wording) and in the case of formal variants (changes of punctuation, parentheses, italics, etc.)”. The textual history of Locke's Essay is extremely complicated. While there is no manuscript of the first edition of the book, there were four editions in Locke's lifetime, each new one containing extensive and significant revisions, as well as a posthumous edition published shortly after the author's death. There was a translation into French made with Locke's cooperation and published in 1700, and a Latin translation came out a year later. Nevertheless, Nidditch managed to record all the material variants in footnotes to the text, in a way that makes it fairly easy to track the changes that Locke made to successive editions of the book, and to locate points at which judgements had to be made as a critical text was established on the basis of the chosen copy text. Sometimes a critical edition succeeds in completely changing the way that a text is read. Peter Laslett's 1960 edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government is a good example. Nidditch's edition of the Essay did not have that kind of very dramatic effect on Locke scholarship. Rather, it made it possible for those without direct access to all the early editions to engage in careful, historically sensitive studies of Locke's account of human understanding. The result was a slow revolution in Locke studies that continues to shed new light on even the most familiar aspects of the Lockean philosophy.

Throughout the twentieth century, as literary texts circulated through high-school and college classrooms, reading became a specialized skill. Especially with the dominance of the “new criticism” in the 1930s, literature acquired an autonomous life as “text,” demanding intensive “close reading” of its verbal complexity and formal coherence as an aesthetic object. Beginning in the 1970s, with the proliferation of programs devoted to African-American culture, gender studies, sexuality studies, and ethnic studies programs, the literary canon became more diverse. In the mid-1980s new historicism helped push aesthetic formalism further from the agenda of literary education in the university, promoting new interest in historical contexts even as psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and reader-response approaches continued to fetishize “textuality” as their primary object of inquiry. Whatever the vagaries of theory, method, and subdisciplinary turf battles through which scholars have wandered over the last few decades, we have remained in our professional practices of reading and teaching committed to a hermeneutics of interpretation. Even as scholars developed arguments about history or culture, the teaching and criticism of literature has continued to rely on the institutional and psychological isolation of reading, as an individual exercise in mastery of the text fostered by silence and solitude.