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Historians are people of the paper, always hoping for the revelation of some remarkable event sitting unremarked upon in an archival page. We are equally sure that such revelations are rare, and usually the products of many dozens of hours of toil. With Gruesome Looking Objects, I discovered the thread of the story in about […]
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…when we be in trouble, or sickness, or lose any thing, we run hither and thither to wyssardes, or sorcerers, whom we call wise men; when there is no man foolish and blind as they be: for the devil leadeth them according unto his will and pleasure, and yet we run after them, seeking aid […]
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Do we really need another post-1945 history of the United States? That was what I asked myself when a senior editor at Cambridge University Press approached me about writing Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States Since 1945 in 2017. After all, the academic publishing market already abounded with excellent survey texts covering […]
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The Muslim community, known as the umma, is meant to be united. The Qur’an, in chapter 29, verse 92, states that “Indeed, this your umma is one umma, and I am your Lord; so worship Me.” Yet Muslims, just like Jews, Christians and other religious groups, divided into various communal divisions quite early in their […]
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On May 12, 1720, health officials in Marseille wrote the gouverneur of the region of Provence in Paris requesting to expedite the construction of a new building for the local Bureau de la santé or Health Board. The structure that had stood there since 1660 was a bureau flotant—literally a floating office—that stood on the […]
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A year or so before South Africa hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup, a visiting professor gave a talk at a South African university. He asked a very simple question: How do you win a world cup? Do you, he continued, appoint a very expensive coach? This, in fact, was exactly what South Africa had […]
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On November 17 my latest book is finally published and I just wanted to give a brief outline here of what it’s about. Titled Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought: Turkish and Egyptian Scholars on the Disruption of Islamic Knowledge, it starts off from a basic observation: if you read any of the histories of […]
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‘Detail of the manipulation of the scalpel in order to make incisions’ from J. M. Bourgery and N. H. Jacob, Atlas d’anatomie humaine et de chirurgie (1831-54), vol. 1, plate 15. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark’.
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