Research

One reason that I love living in Chicago is all the resources available to me for research. Yesterday, I took a trip down to my old school, the University of Chicago, to do some research on Darwin. Nothing too intense; just verifying some citations that I picked up from some recent essays. But the sources were from books and articles written in the 1860s. The library didn’t just have reprints of these old books; they had the 1860 prints themselves. It was almost religious to flip through the smelly, dusty tomes that were falling apart, looking for some small reference to their friend Darwin. A couple of my citations were incorrect, so without any alternative citation, I had to search for bizarre clues that would lead me to the right place. It was quite the game, and I enjoyed it. I think my favorite part came at the end, when I was flipping through a truly massive book that held newspapers from the 1860s London rag The Spectator, where I found an anonymous letter (actually written by Darwin’s former mentor) criticizing Darwin’s theory as utterly ridiculous. Inside the paper, though, were just tons of ordinary articles written to Londoners about various shows, gossip, news, and other very mundane things. It gave a very personable and non-academic look into their lives, and I caught myself spending well over an hour just reading random bits addictively– sort of like blog surfing for no purpose, actually.