The Crazy Guy Who Invented History

Joseph Gould and the idea of oral history

Joseph Gould

Ideas have histories. All of history is fundamentally a history of ideas. Sometimes the ideas come from strange places at the margins of mental health.

It is February 27, 1916. Far away from Verdun, where a series of five attempted assaults to retake Fort Douaumont from the Germans fail at great cost in French life — far away from the English…