Blogging Historians

I still amazed that a number of historians have taken to information technology. I always thought of history as a very conservative discipline. During my graduation school days in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my profs looked askance at "gimmicks" like OH projectors. Films were stuff for the high school coaches who doubled as history teachers. "Real" history teachers didn't rely of "gimmicks." In the mid-1990s, I encountered a growing group of historians who embraced the Internet and associated technology. Now, historians are bloggers. If this is (fair & balanced) incredulity, so be it.

Were There Blog Enough and Time^*
by Ralph E. Luker

As the 20th century faded into the 21st, the Internet gave birth to a new form of communication, the weblog or "blog." A blog is a commonplace journal maintained on the Internet, where it is accessible to other readers. At the beginning of 1999, there were about two-dozen blogs known to exist. This was an intimate world, in which every blogger could be known to all other bloggers, but during that year the first free create-your-own-weblog tools became available and the numbers of bloggers grew into the hundreds.¹

Blogs take a variety of forms, from daily personal journals to occasional essays. Some blogs are exclusively individual efforts; others are collective ventures or group blogs. Some are done anonymously or pseudonymously; other people blog in their own names. Some enable readers' comments in response to what they've read; others do not. Blogs by academics are a very small part of the blog world—or "blogosphere"—which by now according to various estimates includes over 5 million blogs, though the numbers change constantly and no one really knows for sure because the attrition rate is also high. By now, however, academic blogs include some high profile public intellectuals, such as Penn State's Michael Berube (click here) and Chicago's Richard Posner (click here).

In mid-November 1999, 25-year-old Kevin C. Murphy was probably the first (future) historian to begin blogging. He was then an aide to James Carville, President Clinton's former senior political advisor, and is now a graduate student in 20th-century American political history at Columbia University. Despite his youth, the early launch of his Ghost in the Machine (click here) earns Murphy the honor of being the elder statesman of history bloggers. In the history blogosphere, November 1999 is ancient history. Indeed, Swarthmore's Timothy Burke archives all of his blog, Easily Distracted
(click here), prior to December 2003 as "ancient blog." It isn't that blogging historians are overwhelmed by "presentism," but that the form itself is so new and in flux.

Two years ago, when I first became a blogging historian, history bloggers were vaguely aware of each other. A few of us, like historian/journalists Eric Alterman (click here) and Josh Marshall (click here), had a substantial audience. As our numbers grew and we slowly found each other, the virtual seminar of mutual teaching and learning built a sense of community. In September 2004, the group blog at the History News Network called Cliopatria (click here)—the blog to which I belong—created a list or "blogroll" of all known history blogs. So far, we have found about 145 of them, including one each in Dutch, Finnish, French, and Portuguese.

Since 2003 is "ancient history," anonymity is a possibility, and attrition so high among bloggers, history blogging already has its legendary figures. Foremost among them is Invisible Adjunct (click here). This very smart, young historian, who noticed the ways in which she was marginalized as an adjunct professor of history, hosted engaging conversations about many subjects between February 2003 and August 2004. With astonishing rapidity, she found a large audience among academics, especially perhaps among women, but also men who were thinking about academic careers or who had already experienced the tough job market. It was a sad day in August for all of us who admired her work, when the Invisible Adjunct waved goodbye to history's marketplace, hung up her keyboard, and prepared to enter law school.² History departments missed an opportunity to make an appointment of rare quality, but we anticipate a second coming of IA at next year's AHA annual meeting, where she will appear on a panel discussion about history blogging.

Female history bloggers may be more likely to post anonymously or pseudonymously than males, but not all of them do. My colleagues at Cliopatria, Hala Fattah and Sharon Howard, are good examples. Born in Baghdad, Fattah did her graduate work and taught Near Eastern studies in the United States before returning to the Middle East, where she posts with us from Amman, Jordan. Before joining us, Fattah briefly posted her beautiful essays at Askari Street (click here), named for the street in Baghdad on which she grew up. Sharon Howard, a specialist in early modern British history, is currently on a postdoc at the University of Wales. Like many history bloggers, her work on the net began with a web site, in her case Early Modern Resources (click here), to which her own blog, Early Modern Notes (click here), was subsequently associated. Both the web site and her blog are marked by an extraordinary resourcefulness and generosity of shared expertise.

Historians of very substantial accomplishment and a wide variety of interests are now blogging. The University of Michigan's Juan Cole does prize-winning Informed Comment (click here) on Middle Eastern affairs. The University of Alabama's David Beito leads a libertarian group blog called Liberty & Power (click here). Jon Wiener (click here) the blog of the historian at the University of California at Irvine, flogs his radio programming schedule; and Emory's Deborah Lipstadt promotes her recent book at History on Trial (click here. Like Sharon Howard, Ohio State's prize-winning military historian Mark Grimsley blogs in conjunction with a sophisticated web site, War Historian.org (click here). His blog's title, Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, announces his intention to transform traditional military history. Grimsley claims our attention by juxtaposing photographs of Che Guevara and Robert E. Lee at the top of his site and holds it with fascinating posts that envision a postcolonial military history, explore the Civil War counter-factually, and frankly discuss the professional struggle upward. His blogging is also infectious, as one of his advanced undergraduate students has launched Classical Archaeologist (click here).

In a world where a 30-year-old graduate student is the elder statesman, a beginning law student who left the history job market is legendary, and an advanced undergraduate woman does classical archaeology, the population is fairly young. When I join them in the morning, I sometimes feel a little old and dull. But, there, the banquet feast is spread; and, then, the seminar begins. My young teachers are often graduate students or postdocs: Manan Ahmed, a native of Pakistan and graduate student at the University of Chicago, who blogs as Sepoy at Chapati Mystery (click here), teaches me about south Asian history and culture; at Roblog (click here), Rob MacDougall, a Canadian on a postdoc at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, posts his remarkable essays on the history of American business and technology and shares his love of robots; and Caleb McDaniel, a young Texan at Johns Hopkins, blogs at Mode for Caleb (click here), where he shares his love of jazz and remarkable understanding of trans-Atlantic abolitionism. I learn about current graduate student life at Harvard and religion and race in 17th-century Chesapeake Bay from Rebecca Goetz at (a) musings of a grad student (click here); and Esther MacCallum-Stewart, a postgraduate at England's University of Sussex, who blogs at Break of Day in the Trenches (click here), teaches me about the cultural impact of World War I. MacCallum-Stewart, Paula Petrik (click here) of George Mason University, and Kelly Woestman of Pittsburgh State University, who blogs at Kelly in Kansas (click here), are pioneering in the use of blogs as a tool for teaching history to their students.³

Why do they do it, you ask. My colleague at Cliopatria, Tim Burke (who also posts thoughtful essays at his own blog, Easily Distracted), recently offered five reasons:

• Because I want to introduce some unexpected influences and ideas into my intellectual and academic work. I want to unsettle the overly domesticated, often hermetic thinking that comes with academic specialization. I want to introduce a "mutational vector" into my scholarly and intellectual work.


• Because I want a place to publish small writings, odd writings, leftover writings, lazy speculations, half-formed hypotheses. I want a place to publish all the things that I think have some value but not enough to constitute legitimate scholarship. I want a chance to branch into new areas of specialization at a reduced level of intensity and seriousness.


• Because I want to find out how much of my scholarly work is usefully translatable into a wider public conversation. A lot of my writings on Iraq, for example, are really a public working-out of more scholarly writing I'm doing in my current monograph, a translation of my academic engagement with the historiography of imperialism.


• Because I want to model for myself and others how we should all behave within an idealized democratic public sphere. I want to figure out how to behave responsibly but also generatively, how to rise to the better angels of my communicative nature.


• Because I'm a compulsive loudmouth.⁴

Burke's fifth point must have amused his colleagues at Swarthmore as much as it did his virtual colleagues in cyberspace, because he models for himself and others "how we should all behave within an idealized democratic public sphere" so very well.

But Burke's fifth point does raise one of the questions one hears about blogging: is it quite respectable? Perhaps it is not; but as a Methodist, I'm reminded of John Wesley's explanation of why he went out to the mines and fields of England to preach the gospel. "I resolved to be more vulgar," he said. Like Wesley, bloggers are occasionally dismissed as "enthusiasts." But think back to a time when you were young and discovered your passionate love of history. Think back to a time when your idealism told you that, if you could afford to do it, teaching and learning was what you would do, even if you were not paid to do it. I was not being paid when I found that Cliopatria had its first reader from Nepal, but money could not have bought the thrill of it. There I am, sitting on a blog in Atlanta, and my student on the other end of that blog is somewhere in the high reaches of Nepal. Amazing.

---

Notes
^*With apologies to Andrew Marvel and "To His Coy Mistress."

¹Rebecca Blood, "Weblogs: A History and Perspective," Rebecca's Pocket (click here), September 7, 2000; January 7, 2005.

²Scott Smallwood, "Disappearing Act: The Invisible Adjunct Shuts Down Her Popular Weblog and Says Goodbye to Academe," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 30, 2004, A10–11.

³Austin Lingerfelt, "The Classroom Blog: A Moment for Literacy, A Moment for Giving Pause," Essence Renewed, December 12, 2004

(click here);

and Shola Adenekan, "Academics Give Lessons on Blogs," BBC News, January 23, 2005
(click here).

With mixed results, Northwestern University's Eszter Hargittai, Steven D. Krause of Eastern Michigan University, and Georgia State University's Charles Tryon have had their students of communications, sociology, and literature respectively, maintain blogs as a part of their course work.

See: Hargittai's Internet & Society Course Blog
(click here);

Krause, "When Blogging Goes Bad" Kairos, 9.1
(click here);

and Tryon's Writing to the Moment
(click here)

and Rhetoric and Democracy
(click here).

⁴Timothy Burke, "Burke's Home for Imaginary Friends," Easily Distracted (click here), January 26, 2005.

Before he became a blogger, Ralph Luker was co-editor of the first two volumes of the Martin Luther King Papers. Currently, Luker is the founder of and "blogmeister" at Cliopatria, http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html.

Copyright © 2005 American Historical Association

Going Through The Motions

I played football under Coach Don (Dip) Evans. When I was a sophomore, Coach Evans also was the JV basketball coach when I played on that squad. Regular as a heartbeat, if we were behind at halftime, Coach Evans would proclaim that we were just going through the motions. Not once do I remember a defensive or an offensive adjustment at halftime. If we would just quit "going through the motions" everything would be aright with the world. More often than not, we lost the game. Now, Tom Friedman echos Don (Dip) Evans. We are going through the motions in the global economy (at our peril). I doubt that a national commitment to stop going through the motions will occur. In Texas, the major initiative in public education reform has been the creation of a booty patrol for high school cheerleaders. If this is (fair & balanced) dread, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?
By Thomas L. Friedman

For so many years, America's economy was so dominant on the world stage, so out front in so many key areas, that we fell into the habit of thinking we were competing largely against ourselves. If we fell behind in one area or another - whether it was math and science skills, broadband capacity or wireless infrastructure - we took the view that: "Oh well, we'll fix that problem when we get to it. After all, we're just competing against ourselves."

In recent years, though, with the flattening of the global playing field, it should be apparent that we are not just competing against ourselves. The opening of China, India and Russia means that young people in these countries can increasingly plug and play - connect, collaborate and compete - more easily and cheaply than ever before. And they are. We, alas, are still coasting along as if we have all the time in the world.

I helped teach a course at Harvard last semester on globalization, and one day a student told me this story: He was part of a student-run collaboration between students in the U.S. and China. The American and Chinese students had recently started working together by using Skype, the popular, freely downloadable, software that enables you to make free phone calls over the Internet to other Skype users. But what was most interesting, the student told me, was that it was the Chinese students who introduced their U.S. counterparts to Skype. And, he noted, these Chinese students were not from major cities, like Beijing, but from smaller towns.

On April 7, CNET News.com reported the following: "The University of Illinois tied for 17th place in the world finals of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest. ...

"That's the lowest ranking for the top-performing U.S. school in the 29-year history of the competition. Shanghai Jiao Tong University of China took top honors this year, followed by Moscow State University and the St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics. Those results continued a gradual ascendance of Asian and East European schools during the past decade or so. A U.S. school hasn't won the world championship since 1997, when students at Harvey Mudd College achieved the honor. 'The U.S. used to dominate these kinds of programming Olympics,' said David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. 'Now we're sort of falling behind.' "

Earlier this week, a special report on the Indiana University High School Survey of Student Engagement, which covered 90,000 high school students in 26 states, was published. The study noted that 18 percent of college-track seniors did not take a math course in their last year in high school - and that "more than a fifth (22 percent) of first-year college students require remediation in math." Just 56 percent of the students surveyed said they put a great deal of effort into schoolwork; only 43 percent said they worked harder than they had expected.

Even though 55 percent said they studied no more than three hours a week, 65 percent of those students reported getting mostly A's and B's.

"Students are getting A's and B's, but without studying much," Martha McCarthy, the Indiana University professor who headed the study, told me. "Our fear," she added, "is that when you talk to employers out there, they say they are not getting the skills they need," in part because "the colleges are not getting students with the skills they need." Ms. McCarthy said one of the main reasons Indiana did this study is to better inform high school educators about what is going on in their own schools so they can find remedies. All of these shortcomings developed over time, Ms. McCarthy said, but "we as a nation became complacent about them."

America today reminds me of our last Olympic basketball team - that lackadaisical group that brought home the bronze medal. We think that all we need to do is show up and everyone else will fold - because, after all, we're just competing with ourselves.

And we think we don't need to get focused and play together like a team, with Democrats and Republicans actually working together. Well, on the basketball court - and in a flat world, where everyone now has access to all the same coaching techniques, training methods and scouting reports - a more focused, motivated team always beats a collection of more talented but complacent individuals.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company