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As a university student I was interested in philosophers and historians who wrote about the epistemological issues involved how we read and make works of history. That interest in the nuts and bolts work of doing history was renewed through my study of Peiresc. Coming across Emanuel Ringelblum’s “Oyneg Shabbes” project was revelatory, as it showed how the early twentieth century’s methodological moment in the historical sciences could be used to study contemporary issues—and engage contemporaries in that self-study . But of course, not all methodological innovativeness is for the good. It's more neutral method than anything else, and the cutting edge can always be turned to evil ends, whether we are talking about biologists who work on developing poisons or historians who lend their polydisciplinarity to, for example, the service of genocide. I think that talking to historians about how they do their work can be an important component of serious research on the craft of history. I have also used the interview format to talk about my own work between the lines of the written text. I recently returned to an old interest of mine, the newspaper weather map, and discussed it as a kind of prism with which to separate out different facets of our historical thinking.

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“Nazis and Neo-Stoics: The Work of Otto Brunner and Gerhard Oestreich before and after the Second World War,” Past & Present, 176 (2002), 144-86

“’What We Know About Murdered Peoples’” [=Review of Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Oyneg Shabes Archive], The New Republic, April 9, 2008, 34-39.

“About an Inventory: A Conversation between Natalie Zemon Davis and Peter N. Miller,” Dutch New York Between East and West: the World of Margrieta van Varick, eds. Krohn and Miller. Yale University Press, 2009, 117-29 and video link

Thinking in the Past Tense. Eight Conversations, eds. Alexander Bevilacqua, Frederic Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 141-65

Newspaper Weather Maps and History. MER Books, 2023