Ask the Past

Spring 2015 - Square Peg (UK), Hachette Books (US)

Lamartine tells us that history teaches everything, including the future.  Good old Alphonse.

Everything, including a whole bunch of things we didn’t even know we wanted to learn.  Want to know how to sing? How to walk on water? How to disfigure a Peacock? How to sober up? How to grow a nose?  For answers to all those, look no further than the most enjoyable, engaging, fun and thought-provoking place you'll have spent time in ages. Don’t just take our word for it --  here’s what Buzzfeed and OpenCulture have to say.

Ask the Past was born when Elizabeth Archibald, an Academic at Johns Hopkins, started posting – for the amusement of friends and colleagues, but also for students of a new seminar she had devised called “How To Do It: A History of Instruction” – occasional morsels of advice from the books of the past.  Soon, questions for the Past started to come back (“How do I impress my boss?” “How do I put out a fire?”), and with Elizabeth based next to one of the finest rare-book collections in the world, the answers were to be found close at-hand in the historical treasure-trove of the Peabody Library.

Almost exactly a year, and over 500,000 visits later, Ask the Past has fans all over the world. Ask the Past promises to be a book with the insight and fun and con brio zest of the blog, as well as its charm, and the considerable (albeit lightly-worn) learning that underpins it. We need only look at the success of bestsellers like Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides, to know of the market for serious history, and serious scholarship, conveyed in a popular and accessible form (without being populist or dumbed-down).  The Ask the Past book will do exactly that – entertaining, surprising, funny and impossible to put down.