Tuesday, November 7, 2023

November 7, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: The Historical Society in 2013

[This week AmericanStudier celebrates its 13th anniversary! For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and pieces in my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekend tribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]

In my first couple years of scholarly blogging, I had the chance to guest post on others’ blogs on occasion, generally folks like Rob Velella and William Kerrigan whose work I was fortunate enough to share in Guest Posts here as well. I treasured each of those opportunities, but they didn’t feel distinctly different from what I was already doing here. The first online writing opportunity that did feel more distinct came from The Historical Society, a collective public scholarly website co-edited by Heather Cox Richardson. THS reached out to me in mid-2013 both to write a new post on public scholarship and then to re-share a weeklong series of mine on Newport, Rhode Island. Both of those opportunities—to write something new for a public scholarly online community, and to see my public scholarly blogging appearing in such as space—significantly changed my sense of myself in these spaces and roles, and really helped me realize that I was becoming an online public scholar as well as helping to grow collective spaces for that work. I had the chance to do the same for a few other sites around the same time, including Richardson’s next and even bigger venture, We’re History. But The Historical Society was really the first, and I can’t overstate how influential it was in helping me redefine myself and my work in these evolving ways.

Next anniversary reflections tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?

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