What a ride.
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It’s been over three years since this blog began so Idecided to pause the history stuff for just one post and talk about myexperience. I started the blog because I wanted to create an ancient historyresource that was academically sound but also approachable for non-academics.Pure academic work is way too specialized to hold most people’s interest.
We all know that history is poorly taught in schools – namesand dates rather than people and their interactions. What good is a survey courseif it’s so boring no one is able to maintain their interest? I guess it fillsin some bureaucrat’s check box that students are getting the history exposurethey need. Ha!
People interested in antiquity need places to go thatstimulate and inform – without being too boring or detailed.
Here’s an example of wrong emphasis. I was talking tosomeone the other day about the 2012 election and they commented how the southis Republican, and that it turned away from the Democrats when they decided toembrace civil rights in the sixties. I pointed out how race was controversial issueat the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The delegates from the north soughtto have slavery abolished in the new republic, while the delegates from thesouth flatly stated that they would not join the union if that happened. In theend a compromise was struck to allow slavery to continue but end the import ofslaves after 1808. The delegates knew they were kicking the can down the roadand that slavery could eventually damage the country.
After listening to my comment, the other person remarked, “Whydidn’t I learn that in school?” I’m sure she learned some things -- just notthe right things. To me, one of the key lessons of the Constitutional processwas the effort it took to complete the document, and the fact that the framersknew it would have to be modified. Those facts are much more important than,for example, how many people signed it. This is the inform value of history.
With regard to stimulating the reader, let me create ananalogy using disaster movies. What I mean is that most disaster movies beforeTitanic were awful. The reason they were awful is the script and the actionwere focused on the disaster as the center of the story rather than people.What Titanic did differently was make the relationship between two people thefocus and put them in the context of a disaster. It wasn’t the ship that causedthe movie to do so well at the box office.
History is the same. It’s about people trying to survive ina turbulent world – their interactions with each other within the context oftheir culture and political system. The most interesting stories are the onesthat include details about people’s lives. Sometimes that detail is missing andwe have to guess why they behaved as they did, but it’s still interesting totry and figure out what happened.
What study antiquity? Knowledge is a cumulative process thatgrows over time based on what came before. When Einstein unveiled his theory ofrelativity, he was the only one that understood it. Later, when I was anundergraduate student, I took relativity as a basic physics course.
The thing about the ancients is that they created thefoundation of what we have today without having a foundation themselves. Why in9000 B.C, for example, did someone decide to make a pottery wheel? I get that theywanted to transport liquids and had no practical container, but they still hadto do the engineering.
So we have this gap between survey courses that lack contentand academic work that is too detailed for the average reader applied to theunderappreciated period of antiquity. That’s the gap I’m trying to cover. Ithink of myself as an evangelist for the ancient world – a secular missionarytrying to unlock the subject for others to enjoy.
Who are my readers? Primarily students and those with anaffinity for the subject matter, as far as I can tell. I can identify thestudents because they read the posts that one would consult for an essay orpaper. My most widely read article is TheDistribution of Wealth, Ancient Times and Now -- post number 15 out of 259 fromearly 2009. It has been read over 7000 times. My early posts were short, maybehalf a page, and were focused on presenting a bit of history. But they gotlonger out of necessity because most interesting topics have to be presented ANDanalyzed.
I appreciate the loyalty of my readers. We have “the gang of75” followers out front but also many others who check in frequently. There areabout 450 people who have been to the site at least 10 times this year – morethan 75 have visited at least one hundred times. That’s loyalty! Folks from onehundred and nineteen countries have visited.
What about my research? How does that work? I use acombination of books and journal articles as the basis for my posts. One alwayshas to start with primary sources and work outward. I use an invisible collegeapproach – something that was developed in my Ph.D. thesis. The best way to learn asubject is to link authors. Start with the most respected author on a topic andsee who he/she cites. Read those authors and see who they cite. A respectedauthor will cite people he/she respects which is a validation of that author’swork. We call this an invisible college because the authors are not linkedthrough some former institution like a college, but are instead linked to each otherby subject matter and references. This “college” is invisible until it isuncovered.
Putting posts together is a journey – almost a random walk.Each topic leads me to another based on what it uncovers. I wish I had moreinput from my readers about what they would like to see presented because thatwould push me in new directions. A couple of years ago I added a box at thebottom of each post that says “want more of this topic?”. No one has everanswered that call, so I’m left with the statistics on number of times eachpost is read as my only system for measuring reader interest. Sometimes I writeabout a subject that is very interesting to me and no one reads it – sometimespeople gravitate to an article and I’m surprised. So much for predicting humanbehavior.
So where do we go from here? More of the same and better, Ihope. I’m having too much fun to slow this down.
