Robert Darnton (born May 10, 1939) is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specialized in 18th-century France. Read full biography of Robert Darnton →
People sometimes announce that we have entered 'the information age' as if information did not exist in other times. I think that every age... →
We are living in one of those rare moments in history when things may come apart and be put back together again in ways that will determine the... →
While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers... →
My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University... →
I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.
The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st.
The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.
As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was... →
I want to continue to strengthen Harvard's fabulous collections in old printed material, but at the same time, I want to help Harvard move into... →
I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you are given three years... →
It simply is not true that everything is now on the Internet, but it is true that the digital resources available through the Internet have enormous... →
The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people would feel that it's their... →
When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history... →
Robert Darnton (born May 10, 1939) is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specialized in 18th-century France.