Focusing on "History and Theory"

Have just about finished reading Spalding and Parker's book, Historiography - not a very long book and one I could race through fairly quickly. I feel I am beginning to get the broadest outlines of the way history has developed as an academic discipline, and something of the challenge it has faced from Postmodernism. A little bit more reading and then I shall return to Evan's Defence of History for an antidote

I have also discovered the journal History and Theory. LSE has a complete set of this going back to the early 1960s. I wonder if I will be able to detect the postmodernist challenge as I skim the journal downloading articles?

Other reading includes The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research which I bought a week or so ago and which is quite a good read - as the title suggest, it purports to be a less formal guide, covering all the sorts of things that regular guides might not. It isn't quite this, and does lack the many anecdotes that I had assumed it would have. But it is interesting stuff

For music today I am focusing on two of Beethoven's symphonies -the 3rd and 9th. Makes a change from speed metal.

Late evening I had a new idea for a dissertation or thesis - "The Changing View of Kepler - 1900 to the present day". As a thesis topic, that would enable me to read everything I want on Kepler, and could be the basis for a book.

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And it provides another excuse for some pictures on the blog

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Kepler - my hero

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Kepler's spheres - the five inscribed polyhedra. Surprisingly accurate for setting the spacings of the planets

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A first edition of Kepler's book on the comet of 1602