Clearing out the drafts folder (so many false starts…), I see that I forgot to post a link to this terrific essay by Keith Thomas last year. (I presume I had plans to write some clever commentary and forgot.) I think it’s still worth linking even though it is six months old and I can’t remember whatever the smart thing it was I wanted to say about it.
Thomas looked back to the TLS 1966 special issue on ‘New Ways in History’, which included Thomas’s own manifesto ‘The tools and the job’ (unavailable online as far as I know), and traced how the discipline of history has been transformed since then, in ways that he anticipated and many ways that he did not. Plus an amusing anecdote about having GR Elton to dinner the week after the issue came out.
(I also forgot to note where I got the link from, so no hat-tip. I have become, truly, alas, a rubbish blogger.)