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This article explores the functionality and character of the TimesMachine, the digital archive of the New York Times, as it relates to research in the history of knowledge and history of education. The TimesMachine was designed specifically to improve the accessibility and contextualization of digital newspapers. However, the fog of digitization still complicates how researchers can (and should) use these digitized newspapers as sources of knowledge. Using the TimesMachine as a case study, this article aims to contribute to current conversations regarding the possibilities and limitations of digital archives and to demonstrate the importance of digital literacy for historians. There are several takeaways from this article that can help researchers make informed methodological choices in their pursuit of history, including the re-centering of materiality in the digital space and the integration of interdisciplinary and digital methods in the history of knowledge.

During the twentieth century, a number of actors and institutions acrossthe global north set out to develop hierarchical social taxonomies of their national populations. Mainly used for the making of statistics, these divisions soon came to be influential in policy and public debates. Using mainly Swedish examples, this article offers new ways of understanding social taxonomies, thereby adding insights into an understudied research object within the field of history of knowledge. Social taxonomies connect mundane and practical aspects of knowledge in the making – in terms of how actors order empirical material to through these create statistics – with larger public debates on society. They are, moreover, linked to different epistemic and political projects. I argue that social taxonomies should be understood as difference technologies; that is, ways of ordering and studying the social by producing differences between and sameness within its classifications.

The second issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) dedicates a thematic section to modes of publication. This volume addresses recent advances in publication studies and stresses the cultural formation of knowledge. By exploring and analyzing layers of presenting, sharing, and circulating knowledge, we invite readers to critically engage with questions of media uses and publishing practices and structures, both historically and in our contemporary digital age.The articles in this volume attest to the great variety of publication modes and perspectives, from the potential and limits of digitizing newspapers such as the New York Times to questions of positionality in building and using Wikipedia, from translation policies and female participation to the genre of university histories.

Während der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts wurde in vielen Bereichen gerade erst begonnen, die Grenzen von Wissenschaftlichkeit klarer abzustecken und auch das Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Politik wurde intensiv neu verhandelt. Anhand der deutschen Amerika-Forschung während des Vormärz lassen sich damit zwei wesentliche Prozesse nachvollziehen: Zum einen die Verwissenschaftlichung eines populären Themas; zum anderen die Politisierung, die mit diesem Prozess einherging. Sie greifen ineinander, denn nicht selten wurde sowohl in der Öffentlichkeit als auch von den Aufsichtsorganen der Regierungen die wissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit Amerika an sich, aufgrund einer latent radikalen Aufladung, bereits als politisches Statement ausgelegt. Andererseits waren es gerade die Arbeiten der so genannten 'politischen Professoren', etwa zum amerikanischen Staatssystem und Verfassungsrecht, die das Themenfeld während des Vormärz zusehend politisierten.