Friday, January 13, 2023

January 13, 2023: Five Years of Considering History: The Mexican American Series

[Five years ago this week, my first Saturday Evening Post Considering History column dropped. That space and work have become crucial components of my career over these years, so for this anniversary I wanted to reflect on a few particular, telling columns from my first year there. Leading up to a special weekend tribute and request!]

While there’s some definite overlap between my Considering History column and this blog (it’s all AmericanStudier’s writing and voice and ideas, after all!), I would say that there are even more distinctions between the two: CH is far more consistently inspired by and connected to current events, for one example; each column is edited by the great Jen Bortel and thus revised at least slightly, for another (inside baseball, but no, I don’t tend to revise blog posts after I draft them). Moreover, it’s almost always the case that each CH column takes on a new topic, rather than the weeklong series of posts that have been the norm for at least the last decade here on the blog. Which makes the trio of interconnected columns about Mexican American and border histories, political debates and issues, and voices and texts that I wrote around CH’s one-year anniversary in January 2019 really stand out. I haven’t really returned to the idea of a series of columns at Considering History since, but I’m still really proud of that trio, and wanted to include them in this week’s reflections.

Special weekend post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on these columns? Your own writing to share?

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