Bauer's History

In a very simplistic way, humankind can be said to have improved public conversation in society through two important inventions. The first dates back to the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg launched the printing press and thereby made it possible to spread ideas rapidly across Western Europe. Gutenberg’s invention also led to increased literacy among the population, often supported by Protestant churches that aimed for people to be able to read (though not necessarily to critically read) Luther’s Catechism . Public conversation, however, also underwent rapid changes when the freedom of the press, radio, and television were introduced. In this paradigm, media was still controlled by groups able to pool resources, making it difficult for the average Joe to take part in public discourse. It was only at the dawn of the 21st century that this became fully possible with the rise of the internet, and in the twilight of the early 2000s this was further expanded through social media. I...

Decades ago, philosopher Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea of paradigm change . What Kuhn argued was that science goes through cycles: in some phases, many things change at once, while in others, science is essentially “settling in,” with few major breakthroughs taking place. A colleague of mine asked me a few days ago whether there are any tensions within the discipline of history regarding theory, and when I thought about it, my answer was basically no. During my time as a historian, I remember people talking about the debates of the early 2000s surrounding the rise of postmodern theories. I began studying history in 2011, and at that time gender history was perhaps no longer new but still very much debated. Fifteen years later, it is clear that gender studies and the influence of women’s history made a decisive breakthrough in the late 2000s and are now an integral part of modern historical scholarship. However, I cannot think of a similarly decisive shift in the past ten years. The...