History

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MacroHistory: World History from Prehistory to the 21st Century

February 18, 2009 | No comments

I’ve known about a wonderful history site, MacroHistory, for quite some time, and I’ve even posted about it here before. But when I posted about it, it was a tiny note in a post about me essentially being busy with class work, and not having much time to blog. Considering how much I like and use the site, I think a more proper post is needed. So here it is.

MacroHistory covers history from prehistory up to the 21st century. It’s obviously broken down into time periods, but also into geographic regions with a bit of pond-hopping, based on how various areas have affected each other through time. For example, on the page covering the 16th century up to the 19th century, there are sections on:

  • Europe, Africa, and the Americas
  • The Mid-East and India
  • The Far East to 1700
  • War and Revolution in Europe and America

… and much more besides. The articles themselves are quite well written, and the author has tried to be neutral in his assessment of things. In the comments, a few history professors have said that they use the site instead of an intro level textbook. I think that says volumes about the quality of the site. Also, if you find that an article has piqued your interest in an era, reign, or what have you, most of the articles have a list of recommended books at the end.

As an aside, the site, which is done as far as I can tell almost entirely by one fellow, is a fine example of what happens when you switch from watching TV to producing something: Clay Shirky on the Cognitive Surplus.

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American Pride

January 21, 2009 | 4 comments

After watching the inaugural speech yesterday by Obama, I think that, in time, if he follows through with what he has promised, I will once again have some pride in being American. The past 8 years, and in particular, the last 4, have had me  feeling quite self conscious when, talking to people on the internet, I’ve had to admit that, indeed, I’m American. No, I didn’t vote for the mad man, but he was still my President for 8 years, and boy, what a number he did on us. And according to the news this morning, he still won’t own up to dragging the country through the mud. There was a quote from him, saying something like, when he returned to Texas, he’d look in the mirror and not be ashamed. In other words, he’s still holding on desperately to the idea that his actions were right. At least that village in Texas finally has their idiot back, I suppose.

Enough about Bush, though. He’s gone, and at this point, I couldn’t care less what he does. I guess I already have some pride back, due to the fact that America really did vote a black man into office. Considering that people fought for blacks to use “white” water fountains in the ’50s and ’60s, go to “white” schools, sit in the “white” seats of buses, it’s still pretty amazing to me that we voted him in a mere 50 years later. Much more time has been taken in history for much smaller advances.

While I know that the naysayers could still be right – that he’s a rock star and that he will end up being all talk – he at least has the ability in his speeches to make me feel like he’s going to pull through. Unlike most political speeches, I actually want to listen to his, to hear what he has to say and, perhaps more importantly, how he says it. The guy has an air to him that, at least for me (and apparently millions of others), inspires confidence. I hope that that air can be seen by people around the world, and that America regains its position of respect which it once had, before rampaging off into Iraq, before setting up Gitmo, and before, basically, we made ourselves look like fools.

Finally, I don’t think a post regarding yesterday’s event would be complete without a link to the inaugural address. So, if you’ve not yet watched it, here you are; it’s worth your time.

Well done, America.

Update: This picture sums up my feelings quite well.

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Google Maps and the Isle of Lindisfarne

May 9, 2008 | 6 comments

Earlier today I was reading some of Magnus Magnusson’s Scotland: Story of a Nation, which led me off on a bit of a peculiar web path. In the text, Lindisfarne Island was mentioned a few times, which is the site of the first Viking Age invasion in England. They attacked on June 8th of 793AD, sacking the abbey there.

I realized that while I was very familiar with the tale of the Viking’s attack, I wasn’t sure where exactly Lindisfarne Island was. I had it in my head that it was on the west coast of the England, but this ended up being wrong. Wikipedia informed me that it’s actually on the northeast coast of England. The article also told me that Lindisfarne is a tidal island. I wanted to get a better overall feel of the area, so I looked up the island on Google Maps, and in playing around with the zoom, I realized that one shot that was in use had caught the island during high tide; the other, during low tide. It’s actually pretty neat to see:


Lindisfarne at high tide

Lindisfarne island, minus the surrounding water
Lindisfarne at low tide

While you can see the differences here, it’s actually easier to see it at Google Maps, where you can zoom in and out to see the transition. Just punch in these coords at Google Maps: 55.679°N, 1.808°W (or just click here).

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Term Paper Woes (Part 2)

April 23, 2008 | No comments

I wrote a couple of days ago about having some serious problems with getting started on a term paper for one of my classes. Things with it have moved forward a bit, and so I wanted to toss an update out:

I now have enough material to write the paper. However, only one of my sources is an article; the other two are books. Therein was my problem before. In a previous class with this professor, he specifically stated: articles only. In this class, he focused on getting everyone in the class up to speed with the school’s article databases, but, in hindsight, he didn’t specifically say that we had to use articles only.

I met with him last Friday and had him look over what I had. He came to the same conclusion I had come to: while each individual article would have been fine to use, they didn’t come together very well at all. While they all dealt with intelligence or espionage, they dealt with different spheres of it. His recommendation? Take one of the articles and get two books that the author of the article had cited repeatedly.

I ended up hurting myself by focusing so much on scholarly articles; while they were stressed much more over books (books were more or less not mentioned in class), I could have gone to the professor sooner and asked. Hell, my paper would be written if I’d done that; I had three different books on the influence that the American Revolution exerted on European countries! :) To be fair, though, he recognized that he’d stressed articles as well, and he’s going to alter the syllabus for later sessions of the class, to clarify that any academic source can be used – articles, books, etc.

As an aside to all of this, it’s funny how so many people have the peculiar idea that “history is done” – that is, there’s nothing to study per se, if you want to know something, you go and look it up in a book. While this is true for a lot of history, most – all, even – of our history can be expanded upon, and in some specific areas, there’s simply nothing written at all. While there are some books on espionage during the Revolutionary War period, there’s a relative dearth of academic articles on the topic.

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Term Paper Woes

April 17, 2008 | 1 comment

It’s that time of the semester again – that is, close to its end. I think just about anyone who’s done the whole college thing would say that the end of the semester, the last few weeks, are the worst. Even if you stay on top of things the rest of the time, things start falling apart near the end – more and more things are due, more and more studying has to be done. That’s been my experience, anyway.

At the end of last semester, I actually said I’d be away from the blog for a week or two, due to lack of time. I’m not at that stage yet, but it may be quickly approaching.

Like last semester, I’ve got to write a term paper. 8-10 pages long, on anything I want, as long as it ties in with the American Revolution. Compared to the last term paper I had to do, which was about the American South, I figured doing one about the Revolution would be a piece of cake; I mean, it’s the Revolution, there should be plenty of articles about it!

Sort of.

There are indeed masses of articles about the period. However, I’m having a really hard time finding 3 good articles about the same thing. I’ve gone through hundreds of search results in research databases, probably having spent 8 or 9 hours on it at this point, and I’ve just not come up with anything solid. The first topic I wanted to tackle was how the American Revolution was received in European countries, and how the Revolution influenced conditions there (besides the obvious “It helped lead to the French Revolution!”). This ended up being a total flop. While I was able to find some books on Spain’s involvement, they didn’t lead me to any usable articles; I simply didn’t find anything at all in the research databases on the topic.

The next topic I chose, which I’m still fighting with, is espionage during the war. I’d prefer to focus in on one facet of it, such as military intelligence or political espionage, but again, I’ve not found enough on either of those to prop a paper on. I’ve found one excellent article on the development of the British military intelligence; one article about Britain intercepting letters from the colonies and creating extracts to see what colonial opinion was (not very suitable for what I’m trying to do); and one article that, while I thought it was going to be excellent, is ultimately, I think, not going to work. It had no abstract, but was entitled British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance. Well, hey, the title sounded great… Unfortunately, when I received it through interlibrary loan, I discovered that it’s an examination of a few people in London who were double agents. The extreme focus on these people, rather than a wider view, is not going to work, I’m afraid.

I’m at a standstill right now. I’ve one more article on the way via interlibrary loan which I hope will give me enough overall to work with. I’ve a long list of other articles I can request through interlibrary loan, but I’d really prefer to see if the one that’s (supposedly!) on the way will allow me to get to writing or not. The paper is due on the 2nd, so I’m running out of time, and ILLs take time. Furthermore, I have to pay for every article I get through interlibrary loan, and if I start requesting things willy nilly, I’ll soon have $50+ in my paper, which I’m not exactly keen on doing (at all). The articles are only $.10 per page, but those dimes add up quickly.

I’m meeting with the professor of the class Friday to essentially show him the articles I have and say “help!” Hopefully he can help me get things going. This is driving me nuts, as those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed. :)

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