space affected social mores and political power.2 Intellec tual historians explored various contexts that helped dis seminate ideas.3 Social historians used maps and photographs to investigate nuances of life and historiogra phy from bottom up.4 Visual sources became signifi cant documents.5 Cultural history in particular became a shared domain for experimentation as historian-histori ans probed all kinds of cultural production, high and low, individual and social.6 Carlo Ginzburg, for example, empha sized cultural filters whereby people read texts and events in light of their own preoccupations, which often seem heretical to those in power.7 Interpretations were inevitably fragmentary, given partial nature of archives and paucity of material about ordinary people, so schol ars concentrated on micro-histories, not grand, totalizing narratives. Following lead of Walter Benjamin, they often focused on objects that might seem insignificant.8 History had become a puzzle, for which no one ever has all pieces, much less a master image on box. No Zeit geist gives cohesion to an age. All this helped realign nature of historical inquiry by embracing fragments, shards, incongruities, even insoluble mysteries.9 European scholars in diverse fields left their mark. Georges Duby, a medieval architectural historian who observed that history is often told in silences, helped open discussion about space and architecture.10 The social theo rist Michel de Certeau underscored creativity individu als bring to mundane everyday routines in street and in their homes.11 Public space became a favorite leitmotif, drawing in part on brilliant analyses of popular festivals and carnivalesque inversions of power by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin.12 Fiction, too, found its place, notably ?talo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972), with its celebration of fantasy and imaginarles in urban experience.13 Michel Foucault was probably evoked most often, especially after phenomenal success of Discipline and Punish in 1977.14 His spatial obsessions led to vivid metaphors such as field, territory, position, spatial ization, enframe, and placement.15 For almost a decade, beginning in 1972, he directed two research proj ects n which young architectural historians delved into histories of eighteenthand nineteenth-century ?quipements collectifs. (Foucault expanded implications of term, usually translated as public facilities, to include regula tions and normative concepts for streets, hospitals, and housing.)16 Fran?ois B?guin, one participant, described challe ge to conventional notions about architecture and hist rical research. First one must shake off spell of h use, he recalled, then demineralize it, deconstruct it.17 Perhaps inevitably, Foucault's multifaceted ideas were often misconstrued and distorted. He repeatedly denied poss bility of an inherently repressive (or liberatory) site?including Panopticon. Space was operative and dynamic; places always exist in plural and, despite incessant operations of power, changes cannot be fully pre dicted. (In a personal conversation, he once played with Englis idioms: Men usually know what they do; they even know why they do what they do. What they don't know is what 'what they do' does.18) Foucault criticized architects' grandiose belief in power of representation, though he admired their ability to imagine transformations. Asserting both optimism and specificity of cultural history, he acknowledged that buildings could have positive effects if the liberating intentions of architect coincide with real power of people in exercise of their freedom.19 As in other fields, some scholars swept aside this nuanced con ception for an abstract metaphysics of power, supposedly revealed, in this case, in an obscure 1967 lecture, Of Other Spaces. Foucault first told audience of young French