Google Books offers access to the collective Anglo-American mind. From, say, 1750 to 1900 it is a reasonably complete and broad sampling of what was in print in any given range of years; what was available to be known. It can tell you what was generally believed, and also, by its absence, what was not. I use it to trace earliest dates of words for Etymonline. But the temptation is to trace ideas. Editing pages late one night I wrote, When did people become aware that vikings probably had discovered America before Columbus? Did Thomas Jefferson know it? Did Poe? Its like any other Internet search: Choose the right words, refine the results. Forget Leif Ericson; theres too many variant spellings. Start with a set of likely words -- Norsemen. discover. America. Pick a likely date range -- I started with 1880-1900, figuring the 400th anniversary of Columbus and the period of heavy Scandinavian migration to America might be a broad portal into it. What I expected was there. Now push back the dates: 1865 to 1880. Its still there, though without the glow of Norwegian-American pride. Look at the wording in the hits you see, refine the search terms, follow specific references; push your search terms back by 5 or 10 years at a bite. Weed out the misdated files and bad links. By the time youve reached the late 1840s the information is in Hey, Martha form -- something the writer expects the contemporary reader might not know. The number of hits listed at the bottom of the page shrinks. Theres a book about it published in 1841 and a lot of talk about that. Then you go back one bite before, and theres no hits. Youre before the birth; youre standing in a world where this idea has not become known. In English, at least. You can find it kicking around in French and German -- the languages of academe. Humboldt and other scholars on the continent were discussing and debating it through the 1830s, trying to decipher what the old sagas meant and whether there was anything to the story. Rowing upriver, back through time: The scenery changes from popular to literary to academic.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 20:38:12 +0000
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