May 10, 1938

Robert Darnton (May 10, 1939) in the latter part of his career was the head librarian at Harvard University. This was an aspect of a stellar academic career which centered on his research concerning 18th century France. About this career we learn from the history news network, where Darnton is described as an historian of books:

' [The] history of the book is an academic discipline that’s concerned with books, scrolls, manuscripts, codices, and mainly has to do with texts and their uses. Darnton is a pioneer in the field, having authored works such as The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France, and Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris, among others. ....'

About his scholarly goals Darnton said: “I’m trying to communicate the nature of life and of the human condition as it was actually experienced."

'Among the “many events of tremendous importance that we are still trying to assimilate,” Darnton said is the French Revolution, citing a famous remark attributed to Zhou Enlai, when he was asked what was his view [on that revolution] was, replied, “It’s too early to tell.” Darnton agreed that the storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789 was the kind of event that continues to resonate and we’re continuing to try to make sense of it, “but there are many events of that kind.”
....
'Darnton takes what he likes to call an anthropological approach to the archives he studies, and he’s the kind of historian who works from manuscript sources, getting as deep as he can in the original documentation. “But how do you ask questions of documents?” he asks. “How do you make sense of scribbles on paper that were made 200 or 300 years ago?”

'He takes inspiration not just from anthropology in general but especially what is sometimes called “symbolic anthropology” which attempts to penetrate into systems of meaning to understand how people organized the world in their minds and how they infused it with things that they thought were significant — how they made sense of life but also how they tried to navigate away from those conditions in which they lived....

'His passion for the history of books lent itself to his work as Harvard’s librarian....'

A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution ( 2018) is by Robert Darnton who years before published The Great Cat Massacre (1984).