This is a short introduction to using a “database sheet” in your research workflow. The database sheet guides your online searches in libraries and archives, improving efficiency and thoroughness.
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From modello to execution: Canova’s design for a monument to Titian.
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Before (and after) the establishment of the Royal Academy in London in 1768, there were numerous individuals and associations that proposed or implemented plans to create academies for the arts in Britain and Ireland. Examples can be traced to at least the early seventeenth century. To date, there is no publication that pulls together a single list of academies and/or academy schemes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. In the chart below, I bring together the manuscript and secondary literature to offer a timeline of schemes, proposals, recommendations, and attempts to establish academies for the arts in Britain and Ireland between 1600 and 1770.
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Historiography is essential to the historian's craft, so it is worthwhile spending some time understanding what it is as field of inquiry, how historians use historiography in their work, and what historiographical techniques might be valuable to the practicing historian.
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In May 1932 in Washington, D.C., a group of WWI veterans and their family members began setting up Hoovervilles (and taking up residence in abandoned buildings) as organizing locations to press the government to release their service bonuses early—to support them in their deepest moment of need. This group and their fellow demonstrators became known as the “Bonus Army.”
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A tradition with origins in the Song Dynasty (906-1279), the Gengzhi tu were woodblock illustrations of Chinese sericulture and rice agriculture, demonstrating the processes from planting to cultivation through market.
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Alessandro Magnasco painted a series of canvases focusing on trained magpies. This short post looks a little closer at one of them.
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We’ve all heard the saying, “never let a good crisis got to waste.” Sadly, we’re living through a convergence of crises, and the architects of our crises are seizing on the opportunity.
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With thousands of people dying every day, it can be difficult to understand the scale of the COVID-19 tragedy. In the graph below, I try to offer some sense of the scale by comparing the pandemic to several of the major wars fought by U.S. forces over the past two-and-a-half centuries. What we see is devastation on par with the bloodiest wars in U.S. history.
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The attack on the Capitol in Washington D.C. on 6 January 2021 did not come out of nowhere. The showdown was the product of deep historical structures, most notably racism and economic inequity, as well as shorter term forces, contingent upon shifting political contexts. This timeline is an attempt to help make some of these forces more visible. It stretches back eight years--two presidential terms--to consider how the 2010s set the stage for the 6 January 2021 insurrection. A recurring theme in this timeline is the way in which anti-government, militaristic groups have been protected, supported, and cultivated by politicians through policy, public statements, and misinformation. Right wing political leaders have been particularly active in offering explicit and implicit support for ideologies and armed groups whose goals align with their own.
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While my blog posts typically focus on research and teaching, I am currently on vacation through the end of the week. So, I thought that I’d switch things up a bit and drop in a Spotify playlist. Here’s a sample of what I’m listening to right now (hint: it’s all jazz—no surprise, I’m sure, to those who know me). I hope you enjoy!
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The average Democratic state has one senator for every 3 million people. The average Republican state has one senator for every 1.8 million people. In other words, Republican states have roughly 1.6 times more proportional power than Democratic states. Purple states lean closer to the average of Democratic states with one senator for every 2.9 million people.
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I’ve put together a little end-of-the-year reading (and watching and listening) list for you.
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This post provides ten tips on how to create and manage an effective online discussion forum for students. I’ve also included an example assignment for an intro level course.
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This post introduces teachers and students to the process of georectifying maps so that historical maps can be used in programs such a Google Earth, QGIS, and ArcGIS. It provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to find historical maps, georectify them, and output them for use in research and in the classroom.
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This post teaches you how to embed responsive YouTube videos into your web page.
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As more scholars have engaged in the digital humanities—and as this scholarship has become an increasingly prominent part of promotion and tenure cases—it has become incumbent upon professional organizations and university departments to educate faculty on 1) what we mean by digital humanities and 2) how to evaluate faculty research in the digital humanities.
This post is a brief introduction to the digital humanities (a.k.a. DH) for university faculty whose responsibilities include reviewing promotion and tenure cases.
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A schedule for reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace over three months (about 10 pages each day).
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One of my ongoing projects has been a historiography of the concepts of neoclassicism, the gothic, and the renaissance over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As part of this work, I ran some Google n-grams to chart the emergence of these categories. I don’t think that there is anything surprising in the data, but it’s nevertheless interesting to see it visualized. The first graph looks at the terms “Neoclassical,” “Renaissance,” “Gothic,” and “Arts and Crafts.” The second graph examines four different terms for speaking about the medieval world: “Medieval,” “Middle Ages,” “Gothic,” and “Dark Ages.”
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