Fernand Braudel (24 August 1902 – 27 November 1985) was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean (1923–49, then 1949–66), Civilization and Capitalism (1955–79), and the unfinished Identity of France (1970–85). His reputation stems in part from his writings, but even more from his success in making the Annales School the most important engine of historical research in France and much of the world after 1950. As the dominant leader of the Annales School of historiography in the 1950s and 1960s, he exerted enormous influence on historical writing in France and other countries.

Braudel has been considered one of the greatest of the modern historians who have emphasized the role of large-scale socioeconomic factors in the making and writing of history.^[1] He can also be considered as one of the precursors of World Systems Theory.

Biography[link]

Braudel was born in Luméville-en-Ornois (as of 1943, merged with and part of Gondrecourt-le-Château), in the département of the Meuse, France, where he also lived with his paternal grandmother for a long time. His father, who was a natural mathematician, aided him in his studies. Braudel also studied a good deal of Latin and a little Greek. He loved history and wrote poetry. Braudel wanted to be a doctor, but his father opposed this idea. At the age of 20, he became an agrégé in history. While learning at a secondary school in Algeria, 1923–32, he became fascinated by the Mediterranean Sea and everything about it. From 1932 to 1935 he taught in the Paris lycées of Pasteur, Condorcet, and Henri-IV. He met Lucien Febvre, the co-founder of the influential Annales journal, who was to have a great influence on his work.

By 1900, the French solidified their cultural influence in Brazil through the establishment of the Brazilian Academy of Fine Arts. São Paulo still lacked a university, however, and in 1934 francophile Julio de Mesquita Filho invited anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Braudel to help establish one. The result was formation of the new University of São Paulo. Braudel later said that the time in Brazil was the "greatest period of his life."^[2]

Braudel returned to Paris in 1937. He had started archival research on his doctorate on the Mediterranean when he fell under the influence of the Annales School around 1938. Around this time he entered the École Pratique des Hautes Études as an instructor in history. He worked with Lucien Febvre, who would later read the early versions of Braudel's magnum opus and provide him with editorial advice.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, he was called up and subsequently taken prisoner in 1940 by the Germans. While a prisoner of war in a camp near Lübeck in Germany, Braudel drafted his great work La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II), without access to his books or notes but relying on his prodigious memory.

Braudel became the leader of the second generation of Annales historians after 1945. In 1947, with Febvre and Charles Morazé, Braudel obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York founded the famous Sixième Section for "Economic and social sciences" at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes.^[3] In 1962 he and Gaston Berger used the Ford Foundation grant and government funds to create a new independent foundation, the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (FMSH), which Braudel directed from 1970 until his death. It was housed in the building called "Maison des Sciences de l'Homme". FMSH focused its activities on international networking in order to disseminate the Annales approach to Europe and the world. After a sort of "palace coup" in 1968 he had to share power, and in 1972 he gave up all editorial responsibility on the journal, although his name remained on the masthead.

In 1962, he wrote A History of Civilizations as the basis for a history course, but its rejection of the traditional event-based narrative was too radical for the French ministry of education, which in turn rejected it.^[4]

A feature of Braudel's work was his compassion for the suffering of marginal people.^[5] He articulated that most surviving historical sources come from the literate wealthy classes. He emphasized the importance of the ephemeral lives of slaves, serfs, peasants, and the urban poor, demonstrating their contributions to the wealth and power of their respective masters and societies. Indeed, he appeared to think that these people form the real material of civilization. His work was often illustrated with contemporary depictions of daily life, rarely with pictures of noblemen or kings.

In 1949 Braudel was elected to the Collège de France upon Febvre’s retirement. He co-founded the academic journal Revue économique in 1950.^[6][7] He retired in 1968. In 1983, he was elected to the Académie française.

[edit] La Méditerranée

His first book, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II (1949) (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) was his most influential.

The Mediterranean legacy in Europe included cultivated crops (particularly olives and grapes) and its associated consumption habits; monotheistic religion; urbanism; the language, laws, and pretensions of the state as mental and cultural tools; the prestige of the written word; and the instruments of chronology. The Mediterranean culture ceased to be dominant in the 15th or 16th century, but the new Atlantic culture absorbed much of it and transmitted its elements to Siberia, the Americas, and Australasia.^{[citation needed]}

For Braudel there is no single Mediterranean Sea. There are many seas—indeed a "vast, complex expanse" within which men operate. Life is conducted on the Mediterranean: people travel, fish, fight wars, and drown in its various contexts. And the sea articulates with the plains and islands. Life on the plains is diverse and complex; the poorer south is affected by religious diversity (Catholicism and Islam), as well as by intrusions – both cultural and economic – from the wealthier north. In other words, the Mediterranean cannot be understood independently from what is exterior to it. Any rigid adherence to boundaries falsifies the situation.

The first level of time, geographical time, is that of the environment, with its slow, almost imperceptible change, its repetition and cycles. Such change may be slow, but it is irresistible. The second level of time comprises long-term social, economic, and cultural history, where Braudel discusses the Mediterranean economy, social groupings, empires and civilizations. Change at this level is much more rapid than that of the environment; Braudel looks at two or three centuries in order to spot a particular pattern, such as the rise and fall of various aristocracies. The third level of time is that of events (histoire événementielle). This is the history of individuals with names. This, for Braudel, is the time of surfaces and deceptive effects. It is the time of the "courte durée" proper and it is the focus of Part 3 of The Mediterranean which treats of "events, politics and people."

Braudel's Mediterranean is centered on the sea, but just as important, it is also the desert and the mountains. The desert creates a nomadic form of social organization where the whole community moves; mountain life is sedentary. Transhumance-that is, the movement from the mountain to the plain, or vice versa in a given season- is also a persistent part of Mediterranean existence.

Braudel's vast, panoramic view used insights from other social sciences, employed the concept of the longue durée, and downplayed the importance of specific events. It was widely admired, but most historians did not try to replicate it and instead focused on their specialized monographs. The book firmly launched the study of the Mediterranean and dramatically raised the worldwide profile of the Annales School.

Capitalism[link]

After La Méditerranée, Braudel's most famous work is the three-volume Civilisation Matérielle, Économie et Capitalisme, XV^e-XVIII^e (Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800), which first appeared in 1979. [Note: Braudel published the first volume of Civilization and Capitalism in 1967, and it was translated as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800 in 1973.]^[8] The entire three-volume work is a broad-scale history of the preindustrial modern world, presented in the minute detail demanded by the school called cliometrics, focusing on how people made economies work. Like all his major works, it mixed traditional economic material with a thick description of the social impact of economic events on various facets of everyday life such as food, fashion, and social customs. There was little original research in the survey; rather, it was a synthesis of a large body of work by many scholars, some of it outdated. Braudel compiled descriptive detail rather than building theoretical constructs. He avoided all economic theory, and used statistical data as an illustrative rather than an analytic tool.

Braudel claimed that there are long-term cycles in the capitalist economy which developed in Europe in the 12th century. Particular cities, and later nation-states, follow each other sequentially as centers of these cycles: Venice and Genoa in 13th through 15th centuries (1250–1510), Antwerp in 16th century (1500–1569), Amsterdam in 16th through 18th centuries (1570–1733), and London (and England) in 18th and 19th centuries (1733–1896). He used the word "structures" to denote a variety of organized behaviours, attitudes, and conventions, as well as literal structures and infrastructures. He argued that structures that were built up in Europe during the Middle Ages contributed to the successes of present-day European-based cultures. He attributed much of this to the long-standing independence of city-states, which, though later subjugated by larger geographic states, were not always completely suppressed—probably for reasons of utility.

Braudel argued that capitalists have typically been monopolists and not, as is usually assumed, entrepreneurs operating in competitive markets. He argued that capitalists did not specialize and did not use free markets. He thus diverged from both liberal (Adam Smith) and Marxian interpretations. In Braudel's view, under capitalism the state has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than as the protector of competition usually portrayed. He asserted that capitalists have had power and cunning on their side as they have arrayed themselves against the majority of the population.^[9]

Historiography[link]

According to Braudel, prior to the Annales approach, the writing of history was focused on the courte durée (short span), or on histoire événementielle (a history of events). Political and diplomatic history is a prime example of histoire événementielle, which he criticized as too limited.

His followers admired his use of the longue durée approach to stress the slow and often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human beings in the past.^[10] The Annales historians, after living through two world wars and massive political upheavals in France, were deeply uncomfortable with the notion that multiple ruptures and discontinuities created history. They preferred to stress inertia and the longue durée, arguing that the continuities in the deepest structures of society were central to history. Upheavals in institutions or the superstructure of social life were of little significance, for history, they argued, lies beyond the reach of conscious actors, especially the will of revolutionaries. They rejected the Marxist idea that history should be used as a tool to foment and foster revolutions.^[11] A proponent of historical materialism, Braudel rejected Marxist materialism, stressing the equal importance of infrastructure and superstructure, both of which reflected enduring social, economic, and cultural realities. Braudel's structures, both mental and environmental, determine the long-term course of events by constraining actions on, and by, humans over a duration long enough that they are beyond the consciousness of the actors involved.

Recognition[link]

SUNY Binghamton in New York has a Fernand Braudel Center, and there is an Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial in São Paulo, Brazil.

Works[link]

• La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II 3 vols. (Originally appeared in 1949; revised several times)

* La part du milieu (vol. 1) ISBN 2-253-06168-9

* Destins collectifs et mouvements d'ensemble (vol. 2) ISBN 2-253-06169-7

* Les événements, la politique et les hommes (vol. 3) ISBN 2-253-06170-0

• Ecrits sur l'Histoire (1969) ISBN 2-08-081023-5
• Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XV^e-XVIII^e siècle

* Les structures du quotidien (vol. 1, 1967) ISBN 2-253-06455-6

* Les jeux de l'échange (vol. 2, 1979) ISBN 2-253-06456-4

* Le temps du monde (vol. 3, 1979) ISBN 2-253-06457-2

• Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries, 3 vols. (1979) English translation by Siân Reynolds

* The Structures of Everyday Life (vol.1) ISBN 0-06-014845-2

* The Wheels of Commerce (vol. 2) ISBN 0-06-015091-2

* The Perspective of the World (vol. 3) ISBN 0-06-015317-2

• On History (1980), English translation of Ecrits sur l'Histoire by Siân Reynolds
• La Dynamique du Capitalisme (1985) ISBN 2-08-081192-4
• L'Identité de la France (1986)
• The Identity of France (1988–1990)

* History and Environment (vol. 1) ISBN 0-06-016021-7

* People and Production (vol. 2) ISBN 0-06-016212-0

• Ecrits sur l'Histoire II (1990) ISBN 2-08-081304-8
• Out of Italy, 1450–1650 (1991)
• A History of Civilizations (1995)
• Les mémoires de la Méditerranée (1998)
• The Mediterranean in the Ancient World (UK) and Memories of the Mediterranean (USA): (2001) English translation of Les mémoires de la Méditerranée by Siân Reynolds
• Personal Testimony Journal of Modern History, vol. 44, no. 4. (December 1972)

In fiction[link]

A book by Braudel has determined the choice of the carrier as art historian by the character Adrian Korbel from The Young and the Restless.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Aurell, Jaume. "Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Rereading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel." Biography 2006 29(3): 425–445. Issn: 0162-4962 Fulltext: Project Muse
• Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–89, (1990), excerpt and text search
• Carrard, Philippe. "Figuring France: The Numbers and Tropes of Fernand Braudel," Diacritics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 2–19 in JSTOR
• Carrard, Philippe. Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier, (1992)
• Pierre Daix, Braudel, (Paris: Flammarion, 1995)
• Dosse, Francois. New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, (1994, first French edition, 1987) excerpt and text search
• Giuliana Gemelli, Fernand Braudel (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995)
• Harris, Olivia. "Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity." History Workshop Journal 2004 (57): 161–174. Issn: 1363-3554 Fulltext: OUP
• Hexter, J. H. "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien," Journal of Modern History, 1972, vol. 44, pp. 480–539 in JSTOR
• Hufton, Olwen. "Fernand Braudel", Past and Present, No. 112. (Aug., 1986), pp. 208–213. in JSTOR
• Hunt, Lynn. "French History in the Last Twenty Years: the Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm." Journal of Contemporary History 1986 21(2): 209–224. Issn: 0022-0094 Fulltext: in Jstor
• Kaplan, Steven Laurence. "Long-Run Lamentations: Braudel on France," The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 63, No. 2, A Special Issue on Modern France. (Jun., 1991), pp. 341–353. in JSTOR
• Kinser, Samuel. "Annaliste Paradigm? The Geo-historical Structuralism of Fernand Braudel." American Historical Review 1981 86(1): 63–105. Issn: 0002-8762 Fulltext: in Jstor
• Lai, Cheng-chung. "Braudel's Concepts and Methodology Reconsidered." European Legacy 2000 5(1): 65–86. Issn: 1084-8770 Fulltext: PDF document
• Lai, Cheng-chung. Braudel's Historiography Reconsidered, Maryland: University Press of America, 2004. Book PDF file
• Moon, David. "Fernand Braudel and the Annales School" online edition
• Santamaria, Ulysses, and Bailey, Anne M. "A Note on Braudel's Structure as Duration." History and Theory 1984 23(1): 78–83. Issn: 0018-2656 Fulltext: in Jstor
• Stoianovich, Traian. French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm, (1976)
• Wallerstein, Immanuel. "Time and Duration: The Unexcluded Middle" (1997) online version

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Fernand Braudel

• Braudel, Colonialism and the Rise of the West
• Fernand Braudel:Mediterranean studies:Annales school
• Fernand Braudel Center
• Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial
• Fernand Braudel and the Annales School by Dr David Moon
• Annales School, Fernand Braudel bio
• Fernand Braudel at Find a Grave

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2008)

Alan Donald James Macfarlane FBA FRHistS (born 20 December 1941) is a renowned anthropologist and historian and a Professor Emeritus of King's College, Cambridge. He is the author or editor of 20 books and numerous articles on the anthropology and history of England, Nepal, Japan and China.^[1] He has focused on comparative study of the origins and nature of the modern world. In recent years he has become increasingly interested in the use of visual material in teaching and research. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society.

Career[link]

Macfarlane was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford and Sedbergh School. He then read Modern History at Worcester College, University of Oxford from 1960 to 1963 completing a Bachelor of Arts and went on to his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy on 'Witchcraft prosecutions in Essex, 1560-1680: A Sociological Analysis' in 1967. He also completed a Master of Philosophy in Anthropology on 'The regulation of marital and sexual relationships in 17th century England' at the London School of Economics in 1968 and a second Doctorate in Anthropology on 'Population and resources in central Nepal' in 1972 at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.

He went onto be a Research Fellow in History at King's College, University of Cambridge. In 1975 he was appointed Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, becoming a Reader in Historical Anthropology in 1981 and then a full Professor of Anthropological Science and Personal Chair in 1991. He became Emeritus Professor of Anthropological Science at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 2009.

Anthropological interests[link]

Macfarlane's first major publication, in 1970, was Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, a historical study of the conditions that gave rise to English witchcraft beliefs. His approach drew on the work of classic functionalist anthropologists Edward Evans-Pritchard and Lucy Mair. Also in 1970, Macfarlane published The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a study of the diary of a famous seventeenth century clergyman. His approach here, exploring the emotions, fears, and relationships of an individual to attempt a historical study of private life in seventeenth century England, was reminiscent of the Annales School.

Macfarlane has undertaken several periods of ethnographic field research, the first of these a period in Nepal with the Gurung people. He used this period as the foundation of a 1976 study, Resources and Population a Malthusian analysis of Gurung responses to scarce resources and an expanding population. Following Malthus' demographic principles, Macfarlane warned that the Gurung might experience a ‘population check’ in coming decades.

Historical interests[link]

Macfarlane has published extensively on English history, advancing the idea that many traits of so-called ‘modern society’ appeared in England long before the period of modernity as defined by historians like Lawrence Stone. Drawing loosely on work by Max Weber, Macfarlane has contrasted the defining characteristics of modern and traditional society. His 1987 book The Culture of Capitalism is a non-deterministic study of the emergence of modernity and capitalism in Western Europe.Two further books, The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Marriage and Love in England (1986), explore the way English family institutions and social life emerged distinctly from continental European institutions and experiences.

During the 1990s Macfarlane was invited to lecture in Japan, initiating a period of research into the distinctive emergence of modernity in Japan by contrast to England and Europe. 1997's The Savage Wars of Peace returned to Macfarlane's early interest in Malthus and demographics, comparing the modernity experiences of England and Japan. The book argues that England and Japan, both relatively large but non-remote islands, were each positioned to develop an autonomous culture while still profiting from nearby continental influence. Through different means, both Japan and England overcame the Malthusian trap, keeping birth and mortality rates under control, thus providing a demographic impetus for the rise of capitalism and prosperity.

Literary works and collaborations[link]

Macfarlane's work on modernity acknowledges his Enlightenment roots^{[citation needed]}. His Riddle of the Modern World (2000) and Making of the Modern World (2001) are contributions to the field of history of ideas, addressing the work of Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ernest Gellner, Yukichi Fukuzawa and Frederic Maitland.

Another strand in his work addresses the role of particular inventions in transforming history. The Glass Bathyscaphe: How Glass Changed the World (2002), co-authored with Gerry Martin, discusses how the invention and use of glass facilitated European dominion overseas. Macfarlane and his mother Iris co-wrote Green Gold: The Empire of Tea (2003), presenting the thesis that tea contributed to English prosperity, preventing epidemics by requiring the boiling of water and by promoting antibiotic effects.

2005's Letters to Lily distils Macfarlane's reflections on a life of research, as addressed to his granddaughter Lily Bee. As a non-academic work it brought Macfarlane to the attention of a wider, non-scholarly audience.

Macfarlane’s work has been widely read and referenced by his contemporaries.^{[citation needed]} Critics have challenged the role he ascribes to English institutions in the establishment of modernity, and his moral relativism as a champion of modernity who nonetheless affirms the validity of non-Western institutions.^{[citation needed]}

Together with Mark Turin, Macfarlane established the Digital Himalaya Project in December 2000 and now serves as Chairman of the Executive Board of the World Oral Literature Project.

External links[link]

• Alan Macfarlane's homepage
• Alan Macfarlane's YouTube account

References[link]

David Alexander Gray (born January 7, 1943 in Ogden, Utah) is a former pitcher in Major League Baseball who played briefly for the Boston Red Sox during the 1964 season. Listed at 6' 1", 190 lb., he batted and threw right-handed.

Gray was signed by the Red Sox out of the Weber State University. In nine appearances, he posted a 9.00 ERA with 17 strikeouts in 13.0 innings of work, including one start and six games finished. He did not have a decision.

Dave Gray is one of only a few major leaguers to have a lifetime 1.000 batting average. On June 20, 1964, Dave Gray singled off of Milt Pappas of the Baltimore Orioles in the seventh inning of the game between the Orioles and the Boston Red Sox. It was Gray's only major league at bat.

Sources[link]

• Career statistics and player information from Baseball-Reference
• Retrosheet

This biographical article relating to an American baseball pitcher born in the 1940s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

This article relies on references to primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject, rather than references from independent authors and third-party publications. Please add citations from reliable sources. (September 2011)

Manuel De Landa, (born 1952 in Mexico City), is a writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is presently the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland; a visiting professor at the University of Southern California School of Architecture in Los Angeles^{[citation needed]}; a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and an adjunct professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York.^[1] He was previously an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and a lecturer at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. De Landa has a BFA from New York's School of Visual Arts.

He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006). He has published many articles and essays and lectured extensively in Europe and in the United States. His work focuses on the theories of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on one hand, and modern science, self-organizing matter, artificial life and intelligence, economics, architecture, chaos theory, history of science, nonlinear dynamics, cellular automata on the other.

Alongside his intellectual work, De Landa made several short Super 8 and 16mm films in the 1970s and early 1980s. He pulled them from circulation after the original negatives were lost. In 2011, Anthology Film Archives restored and reissued them. Cited by filmmaker Nick Zedd in his Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, De Landa associated with many of the experimental and art filmmakers of this New York based movement. Much of De Landa's film work is inspired by his interest in philosophy and critical theory; one of his best known films, Raw Nerves, has been described as a 'Lacanian thriller' by at least one critic.

His latest book (as of March 2011) is Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason, which explores simulations of emergence in systems of different scales, from the atomic to the social.

Books[link]

• War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991)
• A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997)
• Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002)
• A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006)
• Deleuze: History and Science (2010)
• Philosophy & Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (2011)

See also[link]

• Gilles Deleuze
• Noosphere
• Realism
• Wargaming

External links[link]

• Manuel de Landa Faculty profile at European Graduate School EGS. Biography, bibliography, photos, quotes and video lectures.
• Manuel DeLanda Annotated Bibliography with links to articles
• Various texts
• http://www.canisius.edu/topos/delanda.asp
• Interview
• Interview on Ctheory
• Other interview by Paul Miller
• "Markets and antimarkets in the world economy" by DeLanda

Notes[link]

1. ^ See: Manuel de Landa Faculty profile at European Graduate School

Jacob Soll (born 1968) is a historian of early modern Europe who is researching the origins of the modern state. He is currently a professor at Rutgers University-Camden and has won the 2005 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009.^[1][2][3] In 2011 he was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship.^[4]

He has authored two books: Publishing "The Prince" (2005) and The Information Master (2009).

Early life and career[link]

Soll was born in Madison, Wisconsin. His parents are David Soll, a molecular geneticist, and Beth Soll, née Bronfenbrenner, a modern dance choreographer. His grandfather is child psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner. Through his maternal Grandmother, Liese Bronfenbrenner, née Price, Soll is the great grandson of the English author and professor, Hereward Thimbleby Price, and a descendent of the Prym family of industrialists and academics from Aachen, Stolberg, Düren and Bonn, Germany. Early hometowns included Cambridge, Massachusetts, Iowa City and Paris, France. He earned a a B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1991,^[5] a D.E.A. in 1993 from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and a Ph.D. in 1998 from Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has worked in Lisbon, Portugal as Bolseiro of the Biblioteca Nacionale de Lisboa and in Florence, Italy as a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute.

He studies the intellectual, political, cultural, and institutional history of 16th-18th century Western Europe, to explore how political thought and criticism develop in relation to government institutions. Soll's first book, Publishing "The Prince" (2005), examines the role of commentaries, editions, and translations of Machiavelli produced by the previously little-studied figure Amelot de La Houssaye (1634-1706), who became the most influential writer on secular politics during the reign of Louis XIV. Grounded in analysis of archival, manuscript, and early printed sources, Soll shows how Amelot and his publishers arranged prefaces, columns, and footnotes in a manner that transformed established works, imbuing books previously considered as supporting royal power with an alternate, even revolutionary, political message. Publishing "The Prince" was the winner of the American Philosophical Society's 2005 Barzun Prize.

In his second book, The Information Master (2009), he investigates the formation of a state-information gathering and classifying network by Louis XIV's chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, revealing that Colbert's passion for information was both a means of control and a medium for his own political advancement: his systematic and encyclopedic information collection served to strengthen and uphold Louis XIV's absolute rule. With these and other projects in progress including an intellectual and practical history of accounting and its role in governance in the modern world and a study of the composition of library catalogues during the Enlightenment.

Works[link]

• Publishing "The Prince". University of Michigan Press. 2005. ISBN 978-0-472-11473-3. http://books.google.com/books?id=lzvHGwNBrMUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Jacob+Soll&hl=en&ei=mfJ8TrTGL6f50gGumY3WDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
• The Information Master. University of Michigan Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0-472-11690-4. http://books.google.com/books?id=vVjru_uV_hoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Jacob+Soll&hl=en&ei=mfJ8TrTGL6f50gGumY3WDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false. 

References[link]

External links[link]

• http://articles.philly.com/2011-09-20/news/30180604_1_macarthur-fellows-macarthur-grant-practical-joke