Nothing Happened
Award Winner
2021: Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs)
Bronze Medal (tie) in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs) - History (World) category, sponsored by the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing happened"? Why might we feel as if "nothing is the way it was"? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines "Nothing" as something we have known and can remember.
"Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some—possibly considerable—mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here, with a capital "n." But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating.
When Nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when Nothing has happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being relieved or disappointed when Nothing happens—for instance, when a forecasted end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered.
Susan A. Crane moves effortlessly between different modes of seeing Nothing, drawing on visual analysis and cultural studies to suggest a new way of thinking about history. By remembering how Nothing happened, or how Nothing is the way it was, or how Nothing has changed, we can recover histories that were there all along.
"Nothing Happened is a delightful romp through what is really meant when nothing is invoked to describe something. This is a remarkably original book that transforms how we see history. It is clever and funny and serious and illuminating. You won't want to put it down."—Marita Sturken, author of Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero
"Nothing's left? What does it mean to say that—of a page, of a photo, of a street, of a city, of a loved one? Susan A. Crane, in her invigorating and often funny study of Nothing, tells us vividly why saying Nothing reveals so much about its speaker and so little about history."—Peter Toohey, author of Hold On: The Life, Science, and Art of Waiting
"Written with both wide-ranging intelligence and intellectual courage, Nothing Happened is a book of striking interest and originality. Susan A. Crane mobilizes a remarkable range of material and knowledge, creating her very idiosyncratic, and serially insightful discussion on a single unfathomable paradox."—Geoff Eley, author of A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society
"[Crane] does not crowd her book or overwhelm the reader. Her patience remains consistent throughout, ensuring the reader's arrival in the end regardless of their scholarly starting point. Nothing Happened takes time to digest and can be enjoyed a second time around....Crane teaches the reader a way to view history. What we do with it is up to us."—Vesper North, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Crane's book deserves attention because it deliberately changes the common point of view: Historians are usually aware of evolutionary processes, movements, acts of differentiation and thus of change in time. The author invites her readers to challenge such an 'action-based' approach to history by considering time as a continuum and by focusing not on events but on the 'gap' between them, when things seemingly remain the same."—Anna Karla, International Network for the Theory of History
"Crane develops her imaginative argument in a conversational prose style that is filled with puns and references to her own life experiences. She is always present in her text, even when the complexity of Nothing becomes most mind-bending and when her stories move most deeply into the lives of others. This challenging book may push most historians beyond their usual epistemological assumptions, but its provocative themes and remarkable 'episodic' examples will also help them think about the possible significance in the sites of Nothingness they encounter in their own research. More generally, Nothing Happened should broaden the historical conversation among all those who believe that the past is never really dead and that everything has a history."—Lloyd Kramer, Journal of Modern History
