TrueBlue

Well friends, this blog began as an experiment almost exactly a year ago, and I’d say I’ve got a ways to go. As much fun as it is, it turns out that for a older-school historian, even one who loves writing for the general public, it takes a good bit more self discipline than I realized. So the obvious New Year’s resolution here is to write more, and more regularly, and to turn this blog into something more interesting for the rest of you.

The really funny thing is that I’ll be chairing a round table session at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Washington next Sunday devoted to “Historians Going Public.” My own talk is entitled, ironically enough, it turns out, “A Pilgrim’s Progress: One Historian’s Adventures in the Blogosphere.” Some progress! The session should be fun anyway, since I’ve pulled together three other really interesting historians, David Greenberg of Rutgers, Leslie Lindenauer, my former colleague at the University of Hartford, now at Western Connecticut, and Allida Black, editor of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers at George Washington University. If you’re going to the meeting, it’s Sunday morning at 11:00 AM, a terrible time slot since most folks will be leaving around that time. But the good news is the History News Network will be taping the session, and will put some of it up on their site afterwards.

The past couple of weeks I’ve been blogging some on the Mitchell Report on steroids in baseball on the Huffington Post, and I’ll probably keep doing that for a while–you can get to it by clicking on the link in this sentence.

There was a lot of bad news in 2007, most of it abroad. But the death of Roy Rosenzweig at the all-too-young age of 57 a couple of months ago has to be among the worst. The Mark and Barbara Fried Chair and founding director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Roy was the funniest, most generous–personally and intellectually–historian I’ve ever known. Without his having paved the way for historians to write about leisure, in his extraordinary book Eight Hours for What We Will, I could not have written my doctoral dissertation about the early history of baseball, which became my first book and the foundation of my career as a historian. Roy also gave my manuscript the most searching reading I had ever received, and made it a much better book. You can see what other people have learned from this extraordinary historian and human being on the site thanksroy.org. Thank goodness there’s going to be an event remembering his life and work on Saturday evening in Washington.

Enjoy the New Year–see you then!