Описание
xii Preface
With these grand intentions I waded into teaching the class. Well over my
head for much of the time, I struggled to ind material to fulill my plans. As I
gradually got some control of the subject matter, I decided that I would write
up my lecture notes, because there was no truly comprehensive textbook that
covered many of the themes I was dealing with, and the students were frequently lost or bewildered. So during the Spring term of 1998, I wrote up my
notes to form a sort of textbook. As an ephemeral publication (it was printed
at the college bookstore and sold “at cost” to the students), I was free to revise
and update it at will, and indeed I did so every term I taught the course. Thus,
over the course of the next few years, I developed a sort of synergy between
student feedback, responses to the course, and my own research interests that
drove content in the course and was promptly relected in revisions to the
textbook.
By 2001, I started to add footnotes to the work, at irst as much for my own
reference as for the students to beneit from. However, the task of footnoting
turned out to change the work. I had to be more certain of things I had lectured on; looking up things necessarily forced me to present more detail and to
anchor the facts more in their historical context. I was embarrassed that I had
initially included information I had culled from encyclopedia articles, or less
than reputable sources, and so I had to chase down legitimate scholarly offerings. Bit by bit, the text became less a written form of lecture notes and more
and more a formally written text. It also increasingly became a scholarly work
on its own as well as a summary of existing scholarship.
In 2003, I moved from Millersville to Boston University, and in the environment of a research university I decided to place greater emphasis on the scholarly aspects of the book, and to build my lectures from the text rather than
to build the text from my lectures. The book and its apparatus increasingly
became more like the model I had used in Africa and Africans and its origins
as a text became less obvious.
During the early 2000s, however, other developments helped shape the way
the book grew. Gallica, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s Web site, began
offering vast numbers of books for download, and I discovered that books I
had once only been able to consult in large libraries were available on my computer in a matter of minutes. That marvel was soon joined by other incredible
research resources, including JSTOR, an unbelievable (at the time) database of
journal articles (and its companions like Project Muse or Persée). These wonders were capped by Google Books, which opened up an even larger store of
older publications.
All of a sudden, I could consult huge numbers of primary sources directly –
sources I had only been able to read in summer jaunts to the Library of
Congress, overseas in Paris or Lisbon, or perhaps at Harvard University after
I moved to Boston. But with downloaded and soon annotated copies on my
desktop, I did not need to spend time and resources to go to these repositories. If that were not enough, I was also presented with raw archival material;
the Spanish National Archives put hundreds of thousands of pages of original
Детали
- Год издания
- 2012
- Format