Investigations of a Dog

This is the 14th Military History Carnival, with a special theme of Contested Boundaries. Today is also the day that Bloggers Unite encourages bloggers to write about human rights (hat tip: Mark Stoneman). I might post something on that theme later today if I have time (and I probably won’t have time), but this carnival edition gives plenty of attention to human rights issues.

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The 14th Military History Carnival will be here next week on Thursday 15th May. We still need more submissions: you can submit your own posts or someone else’s, relating to the Contested Boundaries theme or anything else within MHC’s usual remit. Please e-mail submissions to fallon.young@4-lom.com or use the the submission form.

More details of the Contested Boundaries theme:

This can cover disputed territories and borders, which are a big part of many wars. It can also cover cultural boundaries. How does war complicate, question or shift the boundaries between races, genders, classes, and sexual orientations, between able and disabled, or between human and animal? Above all, how is the boundary between war and peace constructed and contested? Just use your imagination.

You can submit your own posts or posts written by someone else. If you feel inspired to write something on this theme, then go for it. Considering the number of submissions we normally get it’s unlikely that your post will be rejected unless it’s outside the scope of the carnival or fails to meet basic standards of factual accuracy. Submissions don’t have to be limited to the theme. As usual, anything about armed forces and conflicts in any part of the world is eligible. Only wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are excluded. See the Military History Carnival page for more details of the carnival’s aims and scope.

Via Archaeozoology, an interesting but difficult to spell blog about about the archaeology of non-human animals, I discovered another interesting archaeology blog. Middle Savagery is written by Colleen Morgan, a PhD student at UC Berkeley. She’s doing lots of innovative things with Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Second Life (don’t let the Goreans get you!).

I think maybe historians and archaeologists don’t talk to each other enough despite supposedly having a common interest in the past. My BA was originally going to be archaeology but I was bored with it after two terms and switched to history - I don’t think I would’ve done very well if I’d stuck with it. That bad experience has affected me for far longer than it should have done, and it’s about time I got over it. I was similarly disgusted with history after finishing my PhD but it only took me 5 years to get over that. (Disgust is a vice.) Studying the non-human is one obvious place where historians and archaeologists need to get together.

The web could well offer a way of breaking down barriers between disciplines. Since getting involved in blogging I’ve come into contact with lots of different ideas which I wouldn’t ever have thought about if I’d just been doing history in the traditional way. Reading blogs has given me easy access to literary theory, philosophy, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, various feminist perspectives and much more. Writing my blog allows me to try out ideas that are outside my specialist area without investing too much in them. And trying to think differently benefits my “proper” work.

The next edition of the Military History Carnival will be here at Investigations of a Dog on Thursday 15th May. As always we need as many submissions as possible. To make it more interesting I’ve decided to give this edition a special theme: Contested Boundaries.

This can cover disputed territories and borders, which are a big part of many wars. It can also cover cultural boundaries. How does war complicate, question or shift the boundaries between races, genders, classes, and sexual orientations, between able and disabled, or between human and animal? Above all, how is the boundary between war and peace constructed and contested? Just use your imagination.

You can submit your own posts or posts written by someone else. If you feel inspired to write something on this theme, then go for it. Considering the number of submissions we normally get it’s unlikely that your post will be rejected unless it’s outside the scope of the carnival or fails to meet basic standards of factual accuracy. Submissions don’t have to be limited to the theme. As usual, anything about armed forces and conflicts in any part of the world is eligible. Only wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are excluded. See the Military History Carnival page for more details of the carnival’s aims and scope.

Please e-mail submissions to fallon.young@4-lom.com or use the the submission form.

If this is a success there might be more themed editions in future.

I’ve just successfully upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1. You won’t notice much difference at the front end, but the admin area is much nicer than the 2.2 version I was using before. The best thing is that the editor doesn’t screw up HTML code any more which makes it easier to embed YouTube videos and Google Maps.

As part of the spring cleaning I installed a couple of new plugins. Maintenance Mode shuts down the front-end of the blog for everyone except admins and lets people know that maintenance is going on. This is a much better solution than password protecting the blog’s directory, which is what I used to do during upgrades.

TD Word Count is a cool plugin which counts all the words in your posts and generates a report in the admin area. According to this report I’d published 174,471 words before writing this present post. That’s quite a lot isn’t it? Even if you deduct the 7,000 word seminar paper which I posted in its entirety, and all the routine carnival posts and brief links to other blogs/sites, the substantial original content that I’ve posted here in the last year and a half still probably adds up to more than the average monograph. Of course if you just put all my posts together and printed them it wouldn’t make a very coherent or well-written book. But I’m increasingly getting used to the idea that writing little and often is the way to get things done.

The conference paper that I’m currently drafting has come together in short bursts of activity - maybe only a couple of paragraphs at a time - but that soon adds up. Partly it’s been easy because it’s quite an exciting piece to write, it’s intended to be very short, and it doesn’t need lots of detailed evidence, but I think making myself write for a short period (maybe only an hour or even half an hour) first thing in the morning then stopping as soon as I’ve made my target means less time staring at the screen thinking “there’s sooo much to write, I don’t know where to start, it’s too difficult”.

Mercurius Politicus linked to Gilbert Mabbott, a new blog about print culture in the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. From this blog I discovered that Calendar of State Papers Domestic is starting to appear on Google Books. There’s a James I volume available with full access. I’m hoping that the rest of the series, particularly the Charles I volumes, will follow soon. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t as they’re all in the public domain. Since the original documents were under Crown Copyright and the calendars were published by HMSO in the 19th century the copyright must have expired by now. Despite that, British History Online are trying to charge money for access to digital versions of the calendars for the reigns of James I and Charles I. I always thought that was a bad decision. If all of the volumes end up being freely available on Google it’s going to look even more stupid.

The latest early-modern edition of the Carnivalesque blog carnival is now up at Walking The Berkshires. Tim has hosted editions of just about every history related carnival and as usual he’s done a fantastic job. There are loads of fascinating posts, but my favourite has to be the one about pissing dogs in the American Revolution.

The 13th MHC is now up at The Cannon’s Mouth. In this case 13 isn’t unlucky at all as Ken has done an excellent job.

The next edition will be coming home to Investigations of a Dog on 15th May. This is a special edition with a theme of Contested Boundaries. As well as territorial disputes, we’d like to see posts about how war complicates boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, species etc. Above all we want to question the boundary between peace and war. If you see anything on these themes, please submit it. Or you could even write something if you feel inspired.

Submissions don’t have to be on these themes - you can still submit posts about any aspect of military history, war and armed forces. The usual limits apply: posts mainly about wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are not eligible.

E-mail submissions to fallon.young@4-lom.com or use the the submission form.

And we still need hosts for June and July - I’m not doing it two months in a row! If you’d like to try hosting please get in touch.

I’m starting to think that calling a post “Am I a proper historian now?” might have been a bad idea. It really wasn’t meant to be as self-pitying as it might have seemed, but of course text doesn’t always obey its authors intentions. There have been some interesting responses from Christopher Thompson and Oxoniensis on the problems and opportunities of pursuing academic history outside universities.

First of all I want to stress that I don’t feel inferior or excluded just because I don’t have a job in a university (or anywhere). The publication of my first article shows that I can get work published in peer reviewed academic journals as long as what I write is good enough, and that I can write pieces which are good enough. I don’t really have any problems getting speaking engagements either. I’ll be giving a paper on animals and early-modern society at the FORWARD symposium at Nottingham Trent University on 28th May. To the extent that I am excluded from things, many of these are things that people inside history departments might wish they were excluded from too: admin, meetings, petty rivalries, marking semi-literate essays etc. I’ve never really been interested in teaching, which limits the kind of jobs I can get. Concentrating on research is likely to mean a continuing cycle of short-term jobs and unemployment, but I thrive on adversity.

There are obviously some disadvantages to being independent and unemployed, and not just lack of money. I don’t have very easy access to a good academic library. Although I have graduate membership of Leeds University library, which is outstandingly good, it’s a 2 hour/£25 train journey away. Membership of the IHR gives me online access to some journals but not all the ones I need. With no ATHENS password most of the resources archived by the AHDS are off limits to me. The last two problems could be overcome by greater commitment to Open Access in the humanities. Oxoniensis suggests looking for some way of helping historians outside the academy, but a formal organisation might just shift the boundary between historians and everyone else rather than destroying it. I want resources which are currently limited to academics to be freely available to everyone, regardless of who they are or what they want to do with them.

Mercurius Rusticus responds to Oxoniensis by saying “Just let people do their own thing”. I completely agree. Self-publishing on the web, whether through blogs or other kinds of website, gives almost complete freedom (within the law of course). You don’t need anyone’s help to start a blog. You don’t need funding or qualifications or any kind of formal legitimation. You can just do it. I think this freedom is important. It would be terrible if blogs were formally peer reviewed and counted towards RAE. Instead of enthusiasm and risk the blogosphere would be full of safe but dull posts by people who didn’t really want to do it. Investigations of a Dog is my personal space where I can live under my own law and say “so I willed it”. As the Beckett paraphrase in the sub-title suggests, this is a place where I can try to fail in more interesting ways. I don’t always manage it. Sometimes I’ve embarrassed myself with an ill-considered post which could have done with more editing, and some of my posts have just been mediocre, but the possibility of getting something good makes it worth taking these risks.

The next MHC will be at The Cannon’s Mouth on Thursday 17th April. E-mail submissions to militaryhistorian at gmail dot com or use the submission form. Anything vaguely related to wars and armed forces before 1 January 2001 can be included.

Then we need more hosts, especially for May. I’m thinking of hosting another one myself later in the year, but preferably not May as I have too much writing to do. If you have a blog (it doesn’t have to be about military history) and you’re interested in giving it a go please get in touch.