Thursday, November 9, 2023

November 9, 2023: 13 Years (!) of AmericanStudying: Saturday Evening Post in 2018

[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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