[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!]
I
dedicated a
weeklong series at the start of this year to the 5th anniversary
of my first Considering History column for the Saturday Evening Post, and would mostly ask you to check out that
week’s blog posts to get a sense of why and how this longest-running online
writing gig (almost at the six-year mark now, and I plan to keep writing them
as long as they’ll have me) has been so meaningful for me. One additional reason
that I didn’t overtly discuss in that series, however, was that this has been
my first truly dedicated column space, not just me contributing writing to an
online site/community but a column (Considering History) that is 100% mine,
started with my first column, has only ever been written by me, etc. One of my
strongest arguments for everyone getting into some form of blogging (if they
have any interest in public scholarship, that is) is that it reminds us that
online public scholarship can be and for many us most definitely is a gig, a
consistent and defined area of work, not just one-off op-eds or other more haphazard
versions. My blog is one key part of that gig for me of course, but Considering
History has been a second, and one shared as part of a much broader community
and publication (one that can be
traced back to Ben Franklin, no less!). That has really helped me see these
last half-dozen years as a new stage in my online public scholarly career, one
that emerged out of this space but has gone to surprising and wonderful places.
Last
anniversary reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?
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