When
Where
Stanford University Press and The Seminary Co-op Bookstores are pleased to host Susan Crane for a virtual event on her brand-new book Nothing Happened: A History on Tuesday, January 19 from 6 – 7 PM (Central Time). Peter Fritzsche (University of Illinois) will join Susan in this conversation on the nature of Nothing.
The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing happened"? Why might we feel as if "nothing is the way it was"? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines "Nothing" as something we have known and can remember.
"Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some—possibly considerable—mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here, with a capital "n." But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating.
Susan A. Crane has been a professor of history at the University of Arizona since 1995. She is the author of Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (2000) and editor of Museums and Memory (2000) and The Cultural History of Memory in the Nineteenth Century (2020).
Peter Fritzsche is the W. D. & Sarah E. Trowbridge professor of history at the University of Illinois and the author of ten previous books, including An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler and the award-winning Life and Death in the Third Reich.