THE CROAKERS, William Sloane wrote on page 3 of the first issue of the American Historical Review, have been saying that indulgence in generalizations must necessarily destroy thoroughness in detail. Croakers, I thought, in ethnographic mode. Surely an Americanism. But, being in historical mode as well, I consulted my 1811 Dictionary of Vulgar Tongue and Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence, and there croaker was. Croaker. One who is always foretelling some accident or misfortune: an allusion to the croaking of a raven, supposed ominous. Very ethnographic, I thought. Ravens, indeed. Croakers: Raw and Cooked flashed through my mind as a possible title for this essay, getting ravens and blackbirds baked in a pie momentarily confused. It would be nice, however, if the ethnographic truth of the American Historical Review was to be its anti-croakerism. At the time, I was sitting on the basement floor of the Baillieu Library, the University of Melbourne, observing a hundred years of P 905 .A512. It was one of those dark spots in the farthest corner of the library. Perhaps you know it well. The lights are eternally clicking off. The space between shelves is so designed that the human body can neither squat nor bend to see the bottom shelves. The nearest place to read and rest a book is a floor and a labyrinthine walk away. I say I was sitting, but I was really moping. I had just lost a fight with the Borrowing Rights Librarian over my request to borrow any one volume of the AHR for more than three days at a time. No matter that I, an alien Stranger, had been invited to write an ethnography of one of the most prestigious historical journals in the world-to take more than one volume for more than three days was unprecedented and, worse, would set a precedent. No matter[Editor, AHR: I was fightingfor my sanity and meant no harm] -no matter that the only evidence of any volume having been borrowed at any time was one that had Be Returned by the Last Date Shown Below-27 July 1973. I had borrowed it myself. I had been writing an article called History as a Social System and was looking at the first volumes of all the great historical journals of Europe and the English-speaking world to see how they socialized their profession to think and write historically. No matter, the librarian said, somebody might want them. But, for the sake of my concerns, he would take my case to the Privileges Sub-Committee of the Library Committee of the Council of the University. So I sat moping, awaiting my fate. To be honest, I was observing very little: no rituals, no mythologizing, nothing ethnoat all. The color of the binding changed