Buchanan, Johnson and Hoover stand in contrast to the three indisputably great presidents – George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, "who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises," he writes.
While physics and astronomy marched slowly but inexorably from Galileo to Kepler to Newton and the Scientific Revolution, chemistry slumbered under alchemy's influence through what historians call its "postponed scientific revolution".
Names are one of the most basic features through which historians structure knowledge.
It presents Ayiti Toma, through Haitians, including politicians, intellectuals, vodou practitioners and youth from hard-hit neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince, and through anthropologists, historians and aid workers, including actor Sean Penn.
"One of the most pleasing aspects of this award is that it recognizes the work I have done in raising certain critical questions about some of the foundational categories through which historians usually think about global history," said Chakrabarty.
Indeed, the bookshelves are packed with attempts, scholarly and otherwise, to explain it.What makes these two particular efforts so fascinating is that the authors analyse the relationship not through the historian's prism of war, empire, economics and so on, but through language.
"Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night". Historians are still revising their views about Boss Tweed, that 19th-century politician with a ring to his name.
He argued instead that young people need to have their mental powers developed and nourished by promoting their memories through the study of languages and enhancing their imaginations through reading poets, historians, and orators.
Facts are established only through the historian's questions and thus are themselves interpretations of the archives.
MIT historican Christopher Capozzola talks about some ways that he helps his students think like historians through comparison and critical engagements with seemingly stable ideas like the Cold War.
