“Remember This” in National Geographic is a fascinating article about memory.

I’m supposed to be writing the interesting stuff, but nothing terribly interesting has happened. It’s coming down to crunch time in the semester for me, both as a faculty member and as a student. This semester’s big projects are two: (1) a bibliography of Sir Philip Sidney for Literary Research, and (2) a twenty-page paper for Twentieth-Century American Lit. I plan, tentatively, to write about Thomas Pynchon’s view of Puritans–clearly, Lincoln is rubbing off on me. :)

Lincoln is teaching a TOP class next semester about American Revolutionary battles; I, on the other hand, am teaching a more practical set of TOP classes. I’m teaching one on scrapbooking, for which I’m still working on the details. I’m also teaching one about cardmaking. As I prepare, I’m experimenting with different types of cards–you can see the fruits of my labors on the new scrapbooking/cardmaking page Lincoln made for me.

This weekend I signed up to write two articles for The Encyclopedia of American Veterans, to be published by Greenwood Press. I’m writing about Theodore Roosevelt (2,000 words) and the Grand Army of the Republic (5,000 words). My friend, collaborator, and former roommate Jonathan Newell is also contributing. [Read more »]

This semester I have three main writing projects. My master’s thesis, which analyzes the newspaper debate over the Hartford Convention, is my most important work. When it is finished, I hope to turn the thesis into a publishable journal article. For the class Forces in American History, I am writing a historiographical essay on the age of Jackson; for African-American History, I am writing a historiographical essay on slavery. I’d also like to rewrite my paper on the Sabbath and Massachusetts Indians so that I can submit it to a journal.

From time to time I browse through Cliopatria from the History News Network, mostly to read Ralph Luker’s lists of links. I was surprised today to learn that blog has a link to mine under the category “Academic Lives.”

As part of becoming a historian, I’m trying to keep up with the most important historical journals. Subscribing to each of those journals is prohibitively expensive even at rates for graduate students, and I don’t need copies of the journals to keep. Going to the library and browsing the shelves in periodicals would be my preferred method, but it’s difficult to know when new issues are published for all the journals, and I don’t often have time for extended reading that is not class-related. So, I’ve started using RSS feeds from online academic databases. [Read more »]

About a month ago I submitted a paper to an academic journal that is published by an academic society of which I am a member. Today I received a letter from that society. [Read more »]

Last year, I looked for software to manage bibliographies. I used Endnote for a year, and now I’m using Zotero. [Read more »]