Starting Blocks

So I gave my paper on wheat. It didn't feel very successful at the time, but I've had some kind words about it since, which is nice. Still, it's led me to start formulating a clearer conception of my project for the next three years. One of the problems with the wheat hypothesis is that it is an answer to the question, 'why did the Federalists think what they thought?' That question skips a step: 'what did Federalists think?'

It's not as clear-cut as that makes it sound. Sometimes (always?) the way we come to think things is part of the thought itself. Our stimuli are just as much part of our mental world as our own words and acts; hence all the interest in what people had in their libraries. Yet to ask the second question first can only deepen the methodological problem. And to answer it in terms of one phenomenon which can account for only a small part of the whole answer deepens it further. Historiography in common cause works not by building tiny bricks of knowledge that we fit together, but by starting with the whole map and then zooming in. You have to avoid zooming too far before you know what the surroundings look like.