What’s in a name?

The twitterverse and media had all sorts of fun with the boys’ and girls’ names registered in Alberta in 2018. Released in January 2019 under the province’s open government policy, the lists of baby names included some real, well, horrors. Who names their son “Despot”? Who names their daughter “Anger”? What kind of marriage ceremony …

Life after academia: a status report

This past week, I started retooling my online presence, both on this website and on Twitter. I made the changes after a lot of reflection and with some misgivings over what I was doing. While not dramatic, I had decided to reduce the prominence of my academic qualifications and accomplishments. On Twitter, for example, my …

Columbus, Indians, and the Guanches

When Christopher Columbus strode ashore in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, he famously called the indigenous people he met “Indians.” The main talking points of his legacy are still the consequences of his arrival for the people who bear that incongruous label: millions would suffer and die, and cultures would struggle to endure the …

Should it stay, or should it go?

No matter what you write, if you’ve done your research thoroughly, your first draft is probably going to be too long. If you’ve never written a book, the thought of having at least 80,000 words to fill might seem daunting rather than a restriction. For people who have asked me to help them write a …

Microbiography: Turn over all stones

In my blog post on book breaking (and the version published by Slate), I wrote of two items that ought to belong in an academic historian’s tool kit: narrative and microbiography. Narrative requires a blog post of its own (but no, I did not mean writing fancy sentences and dumbing down serious work for the …

Pseudohistorians claim scholars are hostile to innovative ideas. Do they have a point?

Spend any time (it won’t take very long) listening to or reading the words of people in the pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology worlds, and you will encounter a standard riposte to scholarly objections to their theories and evidence. The scholarly world is a closed shop that suppresses innovative ideas of outsiders—even of its own accredited members—in …

Book breaking, and book mending

Ship breaking in Bangladesh. Source: http://www.travelyourassoff.com/2012/01/abandon-ship-chittagong-ship-breaking.html In January 2018, Karin Wulf, a history professor at William and Mary and director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, wrote an instalment for her blog, Vast Early America, entitled “Efficient Reading”. Professor Wulf tossed a lifeline to doctoral students everywhere struggling with the overwhelming impossibility …