Maintaining a degree of detachment from one’s object of study is an essential part of being an academic. For historians, that means that while our personal experiences and beliefs undoubtedly shape how and why we go about our research, the things that we study and the materials we use to study them are necessarily external […]
Continue reading →Yesterday on MSNBC Rep. Steve King of Iowa suggested that no group besides “old white men” has made any significant contribution to the history of civilization (video below). Obviously, this was a controversial comment, and it looks like from the video that King meant it to be. Sadly, though, it was not all that shocking, […]
Continue reading →It’s not all that easy to describe what I do as a historian. Partly, that’s a function of the farsightedness that tends to afflict anyone who is so familiar with what they do that they have a hard time grasping how to explain the essential elements of it to someone “on the outside.” But it’s […]
Continue reading →These past few days have been difficult for my country. And I say that as someone who is neither African-American nor a law enforcement officer, so I cannot fathom the depth of grief, fear, and anger that others are feeling. But I have felt those things and the helplessness that accompanies them. Sometimes in moments like […]
Continue reading →Over the summer, I have quite a bit more “unstructured” time than I did during the quarter. To help schedule my time, I decided I should make a checklist of things I need to get done over the next couple of months before leaving for China. (I’ve started using Evernote to organize my checklists. Comment if you have another […]
Continue reading →In my idealized version of being ABD, one of the things I could look forward to was a bit of a break from the rat race that is the academic quarter system. Ostensibly, being beyond the required course work for my program would mean that my life and stress levels would no longer be tethered to the […]
Continue reading →PhD students and historians aren’t shut off from contemporary events. As much as we might seem (and sometimes want to be) consumed with and lost in our own particular slices of academic knowledge, like everyone else we are constantly engaging in what’s happening in the world around us. That includes issues and “debates” (or what […]
Continue reading →I closed my last post by arguing that thinking critically about the counterfactuals we employ can help us better understand our presuppositions about history. I suggested that the game Europa Universalis implies that Europe was particularly necessary to the unfolding of history as we know it, in a way that forecloses imagining history without it. […]
Continue reading →I enjoy a couple of guilty pleasures that are all the more guilty because I am a historian. One of these is playing historically themed strategy games on the computer, mostly various Paradox games, the Total War series, and, of course, Sid Meier’s Civilization. One of the reasons I find these games entertaining is because of […]
Continue reading →On Monday I will be submitting my application for the American Historical Association’s summer blogger competition. They’re looking for graduate students to blog about the sources they use for research, and I happen to already read sources and blog about them, so it seems like a great potential opportunity. At the very least, writing the […]
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