Category: history
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For the Love of it?: Alt-Ac Reflections on finishing the PhD
When I was a bright-eyed and enthusiastic undergrad, I applied to PhD programs in history. I have a very strong memory of sitting in my future advisor’s office and asking him the most important question I could think of: “What, in your opinion, makes a good dissertation?” He responded immediately: “Passion. Passion is what separates…
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Am I even qualified?: Writing about Digital History
About two weeks ago, my article “Fielding History: Relational Databases and Prose” went online for open peer review and possible inclusion in the open access essay collection Writing History in the Digital Age, edited by Jack A. Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki. If you haven’t heard about Writing History in the Digital Age, you owe it…
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Abigail and Thomas
I probably can’t call Thomas Jefferson a metrosexual in my dissertation, but that’s why I have a blog. Abigail Adams is famous for bringing out the best in her correspondents, but Thomas’s letters to her are particularly striking, perhaps because we have so little to compare them to. He burned his wife’s letters shortly after…
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Republicans of Letters
Here are the slides for my January 26th talk at Brown University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, “Republicans of Letters: Historical Social Networks and The Early American Foreign Service Database.” The abstract ran as follows, “Jean Bauer, an advanced doctoral candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and creator of The…
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Leaks in the Age of Sail
As a diplomatic historian I have been meaning to write something about the Wikileaks debacle for some time now. However, my good friends at Monticello beat me to it when they interviewed me and then put the podcast online. So head over to their site and check it out. Listen to the podcast
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Into the woods we go (again)
I owe an apology to woodcutters everywhere. After my misadventures yesterday (see previous post), I confidently announced that Google Earth had allowed me to find the missing entrance to the original Blue Ridge Tunnel. Luckily for me, I blogged about my experience and was thus kept from making (yet another) critical error. My friend (and…
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A Walk In the Woods
I am revising my opinion of friendly woodcutters. This afternoon, I was out in the woods by Afton, VA looking for an abandoned railroad tunnel from the 1850s. My plan was to photograph the tunnel entrance, so Will Thomas could use the image in his new book. When it was completed in 1858, the Blue…
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It’s [A]live!
It is with great pleasure, and no small amount of trepidation, that I announce the launch of the Early American Foreign Service Database (EAFSD to its friends). While the EAFSD has been designed as an independent, secondary source publication, it also exists symbiotically with my dissertation “Revolution-Mongers: Launching the U.S. Foreign Service, 1775-1825.” I created…
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Aristocrats, Agendas, & Adams
Some days I think the biggest problem facing digital historians is our workflow. We are already expected to juggle archival research and secondary readings with teaching and writing. Add a digital project into the mix and the temptation to pull out one’s hair becomes almost irresistible. The madness increases when you are the primary programmer…
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A Gem of A Letter
While working on People of the Founding Era: A Prosopographical Approach, I came upon an unexpected gem in the Papers of George Washington — a letter written by Washington to John Marshall on April 11, 1789. At the time, Washington was President of the United States and Marshall was the young (but promising) Virginia lawyer…