Abstract
Lively debates have taken place about what the history of knowledge can offer that other approaches cannot. In this article we argue that the advantage of the history of knowledge is its capacity to open up new possibilities for historical work and reflection that are deeply infused with interdisciplinary perspectives and tools. This is important because, within both the academy and in society and politics more widely, we are actually within a knowledge turn or moment in which the stakes of delivering and challenging knowledge are unusually high. At the level of events, experiences, and concepts, the knowledge turn needs examination. The articles in this theme issue also show how issues within the theory of history and the theory of knowledge are ripe for deeper understanding, as both explore deeply issues and doubts about such things as historical development and progress and the existence and importance of knowledge itself, its relation to science and humanistic endeavors, as well as its European, Western, and global historical contexts. These articles also advance a knowledge toolkit of great attraction for historians of all subfields: notions like disknowledge, delay, conceptual and logical comparison, media, materiality, information, and networks are dynamic and productive. In the end, we argue that historical knowledge is itself a key concept that is open to present and past, necessarily constructive in orientation, and skeptical in approach without denying that some types of knowing are more powerful than others and that knowledge as a concept and topic strengthens our interdisciplinary historical and cultural work.