James Burke

Proceeding immediately to Salt Lake City and making cautious inquiries, he learned that the boy in question, since he first heard of him, had been arrested and convicted of robbery at Ogden, Utah, and sentenced to one year's term in the penitentiary.

An investigation at the penitentiary disclosed that the young man had given the name of James Burke, had served out his sentence under that name, and had been released about one month previous to the Pollock robbery.

Denton, in the meantime, had left Salt Lake and gone to Omaha, there to make his home.

The boy Burke, argued the detective, had naturally followed his friend to that place.

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Really, I have a thousand thoughts, but I want to start with English historian named James Burke.

James Burke wrote the stuff called Connections, right? He was amazing, a master storyteller, which is anybody who works in this business has to be a good storyteller.

And he kind of taught me was, not me directly, but what I learned from him is that there are sometimes direct connections among things and people and conditions of an environment.

And then there's things that are more latent.

The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run and the people whose ingenuity created them.

Last week, I read some remarks by a distinguished historian, an expression of disdainful contempt for James Burke's TV series Connections, and that has sent me off to ponder the delicate, even treacherous issue of historical cause and effect.

Burke pursued causal threads across centuries in his series.

In one case, he began with Jacquard's invention of an automated loom in 1801.

Jacquard used a chain of cards with holes punched in them to program the loom.

If any one force is dominant, we're unlikely to know which one it is.

History does ultimately deal with causation, but it had better not offer simple answers to complex questions.

So what about James Burke and his connections? I believe he gave his viewers more credit than that historian did.