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Thursday we talked about the canon of literature and if there were similar ideas in other disciplines. I spent awhile thinking about history and how this might apply. There are many cases where one writer, such as Marx, creates a new branch on the tree of historical writing that then stems out to create many other branches that would not exist without the first. In the Junior sem, we recently spent a significant amount of time discussing how the "traditional" western view of the east has transformed. First came Edward Said's Orientalism, then post-Orientalism, Subaltern Studies, etc.

I think the canon of history is very similar in that new authors can begin new branches and stem their own, but is perhaps different in how there seems to be less convergance and divergance through time.