The Allure of the Archives (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)

Deviance and marginality are powerfully indicative of political authority and of norms, and each type of crime reflects an aspect of the society in which it occurred.

It was not created to surprise, titillate, or inform, but to better serve the police's constant need for surveillance and punishment.

The witness, the neighbor, the thief, the traitor, and the rebel never wanted to leave any written record, much less the one they ended up leaving.

it would give them the opportunity to clean up and impose some order on public spaces.

whose authors, constrained by the course of events, never intended to be authors.

taste for the strange is no better, because it deforms the way we look at the documents. What is left, at the level of the spoken words, is to set about the delicate analysis of the unusual, separating it from both the mundane and the exceptional.

unfeeling photographic technology, which perceptibly changes the act of reading and with it the reader's interpretation.

The archive, by continually revealing more of the same, of the other and of the different, complicates the approach to these questions, highlights contradictions, and forces us to think hard about that paradoxical century,

The archival document is a tear in the fabric of time, an unplanned glimpse offered into an unexpected event.