November 9-10, 2013: AmericanStudies Wants You!

Thanks to a couple of inspiring factors—generous cross-postings and links from The Historical Society’s blog and the new online magazine Ethos; audiences at my many recent book talks—my blog has been getting a lot of new visitors lately. It’s also, coincidentally but happily, almost exactly the three-year anniversary of AmericanStudies! So for both of those reasons, I wanted to take this weekend post first to welcome any and all such new readers (as well as returning ones, of course!), and to highlight the introductory post that’s also now permanently linked at the top of the blog’s right-hand column. And second, I wanted to mention three distinct but equally valuable ways you can add your voice and perspective to the ongoing conversations here:

1)      Guest Posts: Among my very favorite entries from these three years and nearly 1000 posts would have to be the Guest Posts. They’ve been written by family and friends, by colleagues, by people I’ve only (so far) met online and even someone I’ve never met at all. The only problem is that I haven’t had nearly enough of them! So if you would like to contribute a guest post, on any topic or subject (and with no set structure or style), please feel free and very encouraged to email me and let me know!

2)      Crowd-Sourced Posts: For the last year and a half or so, I’ve tried for many of my weekly series to end with a weekend Crowd-Sourced Post—a chance to share the responses and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers on any of the week’s posts, on the series’ topics and questions overall, and on anything else they want to add. All of the crowd-sourced posts could still benefit from your takes in their comments, so please check ‘em out and see what you have to say! And keep an eye out for future such posts, including one next weekend to follow up the week’s Veteran’s Day-inspired series.

3)      Comments: At least once a year (and probably more often than that) I’ve mentioned how much I welcome and love any and all blog comments. That’s true for specific reasons—that is, I see each post as part of a conversation, and so would always appreciate continuing conversation in response. But it’s also true for a more general reason—that it’s incredibly important for me to have the best sense I can of who’s reading this blog, of who you all are and what brings you here and what you would like to see and have to say. The more I learn those things, the better I can connect what I’m doing here to you all, which is my most fundamental goal. So, for example, please feel free to introduce yourself in a comment on this post, and to let me know a bit about what brings you here and what you’d like to see as this conversation evolves. Thanks!

That Veteran’s Day series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?