When I sat down and decided to start up a Historical blog, I decided that I should probably have a  solid reason for doing so. There are millions of blogs out there, many of them very good, so why add another to sea of endless  voices?

Well, to be entirely honest, Historians generally make bad people persons. We’re much better with books, dead characters, and dust, rather than human relations. In an age where there is so much digital content, mobile technology, and an ever increasing demand for stimulus, the Historical community is still lagging behind. We don’t have apps, we don’t have social media pages, it’s nearly impossible to tweet what we do, and we barely have webpages. Almost 100% of our interaction with the world is through published materials, only a handful of which are readable by the average person, and even fewer which make it to market successfully. History is a discipline who’s average age is going up, new membership is going down, and is frequently badly represented by boring teachers.

All of this means Historians are becoming more and more out of touch with the society they’re trying to serve, at a time that society needs historical perspective more than ever. Between 24-hour news and social media, trends come and go with alarming speed. Information comes in and goes out faster than ever. No one has time to read a book, or even watch a documentary. Historians are generally aware of trends in history, and one of the more famous is that as soon as a society forgets or ignores its history, it tends to repeat it. By accident, our technological growth is isolating us from our past.

This is a great shame. It’s the 21st century. Age of the geek! We have tremendous power to spread information and education. This should be the golden age of Historians. Everybody loves a good story, and Historians are sitting on the biggest, most awesome stockpile of them. So back to my original question, why write a blog? Because there needs to be a voice in the digital age representing Historians. “But Cody! It’s a blog! You’re already outdated!” This isn’t entirely true, but sure, this isn’t fast flashy social media. But the power of the Historian is words, and this seems like the best medium, for now, to bridge the old and the new. I’ve been encouraged by friends and family to do something like this, and seen the success others have had. The two biggest influences on me have been:
1. For the Record, originally a fan blog of the game World of Tanks, but turned into a massive historical archive of Tanks and Mechanized warfare
and
2. EMScholar, the blog of a brilliant Emergency Management masters student, who is probably going to head FEMA someday.

How I plan to go about this is something I’ve also given a lot of thought to. There are many ways to study history. Looks at stats about birth, or deaths. Labor statistics, Oral traditions, Social studies, Politics, etc. Historians have names for all these types of study, but the one that had fallen out of favor the most is the Historical Narrative – the idea of telling history as a story. This form has started to make a comeback, especially in biographies and current event books. Being a bit of a traditionalist myself, this is the form of history I like to practice. The idea of the Modern Narrative is to keep history as a story, but pull in vital information not previously included in the story. Things like Archaeological finds, genetic studies, dendrochronology (tree rings)  etc. Together they form a new Narrative giving life to the stories we can share.

As such, this is how I intend to present all my writing here. Because I want to address the non-historian, I plan to keep my language casual and make use of contractions and common place references.  Where needed, I’ll make use of modern spellings and standard English translations, so that the end reader can understand the idea. This may not always be 100% accurate. An example I could give is the Latin, Salve. Pronounced Sal Way, it’s literally translated as Hello, or Greetings! But can also mean hello friend, good day, good to see you, etc. The casual reader (for the most part) won’t care about any of this. I would simply present the text as Hello, Yo, or even ‘Sup dog.
To that end, I don’t plan on citing information within the writings either. As a Historian, I use the Chicago style of things, and as compact as it is, it’s not the concern of most readers to know where I got my info. What I plan to do, is in standard Chicago format, present a endnote with the citations to the related material below each post. I also plan to create a page easily accessible from the homepage that will list every source I used here, and present suggested reading materials.

So now the hard part. Why should you care? Well, I’ve gone through all this work….so you should care a little bit! But seriously, why should you take the time to read what I have to say? Well, I think I already made some of that argument. History is important, and we should all be taking it in, in some form or another, and you never know, maybe you’ll read something that can help you in your day to day life? Besides, stories are fun!