Introduction

Abstract

Festivals are periods of celebratory ferment that perform and express the richly symbolic values of the communities that mount them. They are typically fun but rarely organized or officially attended by historians. Festivals meaningfully mark moments in which communities come together to ceremoniously weave generations, geographies, and traditions withnewknowledges. As historians, weare often aware that “traditions” are reinvented andmodified through use, story, song, and science.When we were invited to “ANew Social History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals Festival” organized by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy, we were prepared for the “festival” to be little more than another virtual conference. We confess to dreading the prospect of five days of sitting and screen time. But our friends at theAIHPhad indeed prepared a festival. The enthusiasm was infectious, and we were pleasantly surprised to encounter diverse scholars, most of them early career researchers, joining from almost 30 countries across six continents. Our fellow festivalgoers worked on just about every conceivable historical period, ranging across archives, disciplines, conceptual practices, and substances that included some of which we had never heard. (Gaceta, anyone?) There were several new-book talks that were once meant to be more casual “pub