NCPH Launches History@Work Blog

This is very promising! The National Council on Public History has launched a sort of communal blog, History@Work. Described as "a multi-authored, multi-interest blog . . . a digital meeting place--a commons--for all those with an interest in the practice and study of history in public," the blog launched in March and already has some wonderful content.

The idea of a multi-author blog from a professional association is something that I have been pushing for years.I will be reading, and posting, at History@Work and urge you to pay us a visit.

Advice for Academic Bloggers

I recently received an email from a professor who want to start a professional blog. "What advice would you give about having a blog?" she asked. "Is there anything you wished you knew at the start? Anything you did and wished you hadn't? What are the best ways to get out the word about the blog?"

My usual answer to would-be blogger: "Try standing in the garage and talking to yourself for twenty minutes a day. If you find it satisfying, you might also enjoy writing a history blog."

That answer is too flippant--and wrong. I began this blog with no particular expectations of readership or impact.  And Northwest History remains a small fish in the blogging world--even in the history blogging world. I am sure that I do not receive a fraction of the readers that Kevin Levin enjoys over at Civil War Memory or that read AHA Today. But this blog has brought me a modest professional reputation in my field, some interesting collaborations with people whom I have met through the blog, and serves as a resource for my students. At history conferences someone usually comes up to me and introduces themselves as a reader--perhaps the only one at the conference, but still. And when I went up for tenure this year I presented this blog as a work of public history scholarship and my Cliopatria award as peer review. I received tenure. Not bad for something I began on a whim in 2007.

Four years is a long time for a blog to remain active--it is like a century in dog years or something. A lot of what I considered my peer history blogs when I began aren't around anymore (others are still going strong). What have I learned in four years? My mission statement covers some of this ground. Here is my advice:

1. Decide what your blog is about, and stick to it. This blog covers the history of the Pacific Northwest, digital history and resources, and sometimes teaching. You topic does not have to be a straight jacket (perhaps 10% of my posts are outside of my usual topics), but keeping a tight focus helps you build an audience and reputation. 
2. Don't make it about you. Blogging about your academic work is fine, but if you find yourself posting pictures of your cats, it is time to retire from academic blogging.
3. Don't make it about politics. It is so tempting to become political--what the hell is wrong Eric Cantor anyway?! And political posts will get you an audience more quickly that anything else you could do. But the political quickly drives out the historical, and soon you are running a miniature version of the Daily Kos. 
4. When you have an idea for a post, go ahead and start it. Save it as a draft and come back later. The 'Blog This' browser button helps you get a fast start to a new post. 
5. Not every post needs to be an essay in miniature. Sometimes sharing a video or a new online resource requires only a few words of introduction. Blog posts should be pithy.
6. Share what you are working on. The other day I posted a brief letter from William F. Cody that I had just transcribed, along with a video clip I found online.
7. Don't expect comments. According to Google Analytics I have a readership. 35,000 people visited Northwest History last year (either that or 1 person 35,000 times--same thing right?). Most of these people came here on purpose-my leading referrals are from Facebook and Twitter and other history blogs. But I don't get 100 comments a year. 
8. Try to keep a semi-regular posting schedule. My Google calendar nudges me to post something twice a week. 
9. It is OK to stop. A blog is not a lifelong obligation. With a blog as in life, when you run out of things to say you should stop talking.
10. I don't have any insights into promoting your blog beyond the usual advice--comment on related blogs, put the URL in your email signature, and sign up with a service that automatically published your new posts to Facebook and Twitter (I use Networked Blogs).
11. Have fun! When blogging begins to feel like a chore, your days are numbered. (See #9.)

Do you have an academic blog? Tell me about it in the comments.

Mark Twain, Failed Blogger?

Roughing It has long been my favorite work by Mark Twain.  Of his autobiographical works, it is more mature and less contrived than Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad, more vital than Following the Equator, and less sloppy than his Autobiography. For some reason the following passage, about his brief stint as an editorial writer for the Territorial Enterprise, has been stuck in my head for years. Tonight I recalled the passage again and suddenly realized--he sounds like a struggling blogger:

    In the Editorial Chair 

     I wanted a change. I wanted variety of some kind. It came. Mr. Goodman went away for a week and left me the post of chief editor. It destroyed me. The first day, I wrote my "leader" in the forenoon. The second day, I had no subject and put it off till the afternoon. The third day I put it off till evening, and then copied an elaborate editorial out of the "American Cyclopedia," that steadfast friend of the editor, all over this land. The fourth day I "fooled around" till midnight, and then fell back on the Cyclopedia again. The fifth day I cudgeled my brain till midnight, and then kept the press waiting while I penned some bitter personalities on six different people. The sixth day I labored in anguish till far into the night and brought forth--nothing. The paper went to press without an editorial. The seventh day I resigned. On the eighth, Mr. Goodman returned and found six duels on his hands--my personalities had borne fruit.

Twain being a bad ass (1901)

     Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor. It is easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write editorials. Subjects are the trouble--the dreary lack of them, I mean. Every day, it is drag, drag, drag--think, and worry and suffer--all the world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled. Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done--it is no trouble to write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year. It makes one low spirited simply to think of it. The matter that each editor of a daily paper in America writes in the course of a year would fill from four to eight bulky volumes like this book! Fancy what a library an editor's work would make, after twenty or thirty years' service. Yet people often marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas, etc., have been able to produce so many books. If these authors had wrought as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible. Preachers take two months' holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing, in the long run. In truth it must be so, and is so; and therefore, how an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build upon them from ten to twenty painstaking editorials a week and keep it up all the year round, is farther beyond comprehension than ever. Ever since I survived my week as editor, I have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper that comes to my hand; it is in admiring the long columns of editorial, and wondering to myself how in the mischief he did it!

Submit a Cliopatria Award Nomination

The History News Network seeks nominations for its 2010 Cliopatria awards for best history blogs. Each year the award is given in the categories of Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. If you are a supporter of history blogging, please take a minute and nominate a few of your favorites. Northwest History won Best Individual blog in 2008, it was very gratifying and made a real positive difference in my career.

I am still thinking about some of the categories but my nominations so far are as follows:

Best Individual Blog: Boston 1775. Billed as "History, analysis, and unabashed gossip about the start of the American Revolution in Massachusetts," the blog is really much more than that. Blogger J.L. Bell does primary source blogging, reporting his latest historical discovery as is it were today's news. Along the way he provides a master class in the use on online primary databases. And he frequently promotes local history gatherings (I should do more of that) and offers a scholarly perspective on current events such as the Tea Party movement. When I won the Cliopatria two years ago my first thought was "Dang, J.L. Bell has been robbed!"

Best Group Blog: Preservation Nation, the blog of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It shows how an "official" blog of a major organization can be relevant and compelling. Of course if someone wanted to nominate Off the Wall, the National Council on Public History blog to which I contribute, I would not object.

And by the way if you are looking for quality history blogs to add to your RSS feed you might take a look at past winners of the Cliopatria award.

2009 Cliopatria Awards in History Blogging

The History News Network has announced the 2009 Cliopatria Awards for excellence in history blogging. Actually they announced the awards some weeks ago at the AHA, and your lazy Northwest History blogger is just getting around to letting you know. If you are looking for some smart history blogging you could hardly do better than to explore these Cliopatria winners:


Best Group Blog: Curious Expeditions

Best Individual and Best New Blog: Georgian London

Best Post: Rachel Leow's "Curating the Oceans: The Future of Singapore's Past," A Historian's Craft, 14 July 2009.

Best Series of Posts: Heather Cox Richardson's "Richardson's Rules of Order," The Historical Society Blog, 20 March 2009.

Best Writer: The Headsman, at Executed Today.

If this whets your appetite, go to the list of previous Cliopatria awards form more fine history blogging.

More Cowbell: My Plan to Revive the OAH

So I was looking at the Organization of American Historians new 2009 Draft Strategic Plan and their request for member comments. The OAH is suffering the fate of many professional organizations--an aging and declining membership, fewer subscribers for its journal, less interest in its annual conference. I was typing out a long email response when it hit me: I have a blog.

I have only occasionally been a member of the OAH, usually when I go to the annual conference to present or to listen. I respect the organization, but it has never seemed very relevant to me. The articles in the Journal of American History tend to be narrow and densely written--which is fine when they publish something in one of my subfields, but of course this doesn't happen very often. The OAH conference consists largely of people in suits reading fledgling JAH articles out loud. I have drawn on the valuable OAH Speakers Bureau when designing a Teaching American History grant, and I do like the Magazine of History that they began putting out a few years ago. I always thought the OAH should be more of an advocacy organization for funding for history programs but they don't seem to do much (correct me if I am wrong). So I have supported the OAH intermittently, sometimes feeling guilty for not doing more. Anyway, here is my plan:

1. Drop the print journal. The declining readership of the JAH is not a reason to "continue and further develop" that journal. There is simply a declining public and even professional interest in this sort of scholarship. Eliminate the print edition entirely and make it a digital publication to save money (à la the University of Michigan Press). The Magazine of History on the other hand is pretty good and should continue.

2. Reboot the conference. The conference needs an overhaul! 3 panelists + 1 commenter + passive audience = snooze fest. (The accompanying picture is of the audience at my last OAH presentation.) Some changes:

• Ban the reading of papers and shorten presenters time to ten minutes.
• One-half of each session should be dedicated to discussion with the audience.
• Ask presenters to summarize their evidence and arguments on a conference blog in advance of the conference. Allow others to comment and engage the presenters.
• Ditch the roundtables, which are actually even more of a snooze than the traditional panels because no one prepares anything new to say. The majority of roundtables come off as the most forced and awkward imaginable sort of cocktail party conversation.
• Free wireless throughout the session, and encourage use of a Twitter hash tag to open another channel for conversations. This is important.
• In short, make the conference a bit more like THATCamp. Try including some "unconference" sessions at the 2010 meeting.

3. One blog to rule them all. Establish a year-round OAH community blog and discussion forum. Community blog means that any member of the OAH can create a post! Have some loose guidelines (no advocacy except for historical advocacy, no pictures of your cats) and name some moderators (and yes I am volunteering). The H-NET lists are largely moribund and online historical discussion has been atomized across a hundred different forums. The OAH can bring some of it together and gain scholarly energy and relevance. The closest model for what I have in mind is the general interest community blog MetaFilter, except limited to historians and requiring users to post under their real names.

(BTW, Katrina Gulliver and I have been discussion this at considerable length, mostly via email but here is a post where she elaborates on some of the ideas.)

4. Build up from the grassroots. Encourage smaller regional informal gatherings--OAH Pizza, Beer and History nights, OAH historical tours, the OAH History Book Discussion groups, etc. These could draw in school teachers, folks who majored in history in college but work outside the profession, and others.

5. A lifeline to independent scholars. Offer a home to independent scholars and public historians. And by a home, I mean access to the scholarly databases that are the 21st century life blood of our profession. Academic discussion boards are full of plaintive pleas from unaffiliated historians who lost access to these resources when they left graduate school and whose scholarship is hamstrung because of the fact. Work out a deal with JSTOR and MUSE and the Evans Collection and Footnote.com to give OAH members access as part of their paid memberships. (I see that the American Economic Association is already on it, at least with JSTOR--why not the OAH?)

6. Get on the grants train. The OAH should try to offer it services as a partner in more grant activities--especially the Teaching American History Grants. And industry of history content providers has arisen in response to the more than $800 million that the Department of Education has pumped into this program so far. Some of these content providers are frankly shady shallow commercial outfits with marginal qualifications. (Must...not...name...names...) Why isn't the OAH getting on board? Its expertise is sorely needed, and could be generously rewarded.

The OAH was founded in the early 20th Century on a 19th Century model. Can it make the leap into the modern era? Can any of our professional organizations?

History Bloggers at the OAH!

I am packing right now for the Organization of American Historians annual conference. This year it is in Seattle and I am on a panel. (Two panels, actually, more on that later.)

On Friday, March 27, at 1:45 I will be on a roundtable titled Blogging History: Explorations in a New Medium. Here is our abstract:

One of the most active new avenues of digital history is the history blog. At their best, history blogs can present new research and ideas to a larger and more diverse audience than most scholarship ever reaches, can foster extended conversations, can rally support for important initiatives, and form an extended and diverse historical community where academics exchange ideas with teachers, archivists, and the general public. This round table will explore some of the possibilities of history blogging by way of examples from six well-established and popular blogs. The diverse panel includes academic historians, public historians, archivists and an independent scholar, each of whom will demonstrate a unique approach to history blogging.

The panelists are J. L. Bell, whose institutional affiliation is Friends of the Longfellow House and whose blog is Boston 1775; Mary Schaff, who runs the Washington State Library blog; William Turkel of the University of Western Ontario who recently retired his blog Digital History Hacks; and Ari Kelman from the University of California-Davis who is one of the bloggers at Edge of the American West. Our chair, the man trying to organize five bloggers, is J. William T. Youngs of Eastern Washington University. (Our proposal included T. Mills Kelly of the George Mason Center for History and New Media and the blog EdWired, but he can't make it.)

We will be keeping our presentations short to allow lots of audience participation. So please come on by and say hello and add your two digital cents to the conversation.

BibliOdyssey: Campus Life in 1600

BibliOdyssey: Campus Life in 1600: "This album of thirteen engravings of university life in Germany was designed by Johann Christoph Neyffer and the plates were produced by Ludwig Ditzinger somewhere between 1589 and 1600 . . . . The trouble with the modern education system is that there is far too little attention paid to jousting and quarterstaff combat."

A typically fine post from Australian book lover and blogger Paul (aka Peacay) at his site BiblioOdyssey. Paul finds cool book illustrations from online sources and presents them on his blog. The illustrations are enchanting in their own right, and also serve as a nice introduction to some of the resources, especially European sites, that are available online. He even has a book.

Estimable Blogs #3: Outposts: Timothy Egan's NY Times Blog

Outposts is the intermittently updated blog of reporter/columnist/historian Timothy Egan. "Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times," according to his introduction, "first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series How Race Is Lived in America. Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including 'The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest,' and 'Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West.' He lives in Seattle."

Spokanites will be quick to add Breaking Blue, Egan's masterful telling of a 1935 murder case where corrupt Spokane cops murdered a Pend Oreille County town marshal.

Outposts is a collection of Egan's often historically-themed dispatches from various locations in the American West. His latest entry is a masterful and evocative description of the Irish in Butte, Montana:

Butte was a hard-edged, dirty, dangerous town on the crest of the Continental Divide, and if a single man lived to his 30th birthday he was considered lucky. Yet entire parishes left the emerald desperation of County Cork for the copper mines of Butte, fleeing a land where British occupiers had once refused to let mothers educate their children, and where famine had killed a million people in seven years’ time.

I want to be Timothy Egan when I grow up.

Blogging John Adams

A heads-up for my readers--J.L. Bell over at Boston 1775 has a been crafting a wonderful series of posts about the HBO series John Adams. Bell seems to be enjoying the series but is quick to use his comprehensive knowledge of the topic and the time period to poke holes in many of the details of the TV show, as Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam notes in this appreciation of both the series and of Bell's blog. What Bell is doing is a model of historical blogging at its best and most relevant.

I promise to do a similar set of posts when HBO launches it blockbuster dramatic epic Spokane Garry--the Red River Years.

Estimable History Blogs #2: Boston 1775

When I got the idea for series of posts pointing to excellent history blogs it was plan to save Boston 1775 for last, sort of a crowning post. But J.L. Bell's piece today, Fact-Checking the Huckabee Campaign, is too wonderful not to share. Alert readers may recall that only last month Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee claimed in a speech that "most of" the signers of Declaration of Independence were clergymen. You probably also read or heard that in fact only one of the signers was a clergymen. Bell goes much further than a simple debunking, examining the signers of the Constitution in search of clergymen. Bell's post is sort of a follow-up to an even better post on Mitt Romney's use of somewhat spurious story about the Continental Congress. This is historical fact-checking of a very high degree.

I am highly skeptical of history bloggers who drag politics into the mix, it usually results in predictably pompous and unreadable pieces (see the History News Network or Crooked Timber). But when a politician lobs one right into our court with a spurious historical argument we have a professional duty to set the facts straight.

I should hasten to add the Boston 1775 is rarely political in the modern sense. More typical is this delightful series of posts about comic books that portray revolutionary history, or this series about the eccentric Dr. John Jeffries: physician, Loyalist, aeronaut. What sets Bell's blog above the rest is the deep research that goes into every post. Enjoy.