As I explained in an earlier post, I returned to school a few years ago, and am working on my degree in historical studies. My next class starts in about three weeks, and I’m talking a short vacation before diving back in … so I’m stepping away from the computer and from blogging to spend a little time with my family and to try to wrap up a few projects. An article I came across some time ago — Life Trumps Blogging — is always a good reminder about keeping a balanced perspective.

The upcoming class is called Exploring Place: History, and I’m very much looking forward to it. Here’s an excerpt from the course description:

Thinking of place as a community in a geographical location or physical environment, this interdisciplinary course seeks to offer an opportunity for a place-based approach to history. Explore the local history of the place you live (or some other place of interest), whether you define that place as a neighborhood, a whole village or town or city, a geographical region, or a watershed. Research, for example, a particular topic or period of local history by engaging with historical scholarship, consulting local archives and historical societies and/or interviewing community members who have witnessed local history.

It’s one of the classes that has an independent study component, and classes like that are always my favorite. This one’s so much right up my alley that I couldn’t be more excited for it to get started. I’ll also be considering ways to incorporate elements of the experience into this blog; I’ve never actually done that before, so I guess I’ll be making that up as I go along. Should be a fun time, don’t you think?

I spent an hour or so this evening browsing around on Blogcatalog, where I recently set up an account. I’m still getting used to using sites like Blogcatalog and MyBlogLog, so I haven’t done that much with them yet. But I do like being able to look for interesting blogs by zooming through their categories, or by noting what blogs are associated with folks who have interests similar to mine. Tonight I paged through Blogcatalog’s history category, and ended out adding four history-related blogs to my Newsgator feeds and to this site’s blogroll. The blogs, and the things that got my attention from each one, are briefly described below.

From Civil War Memory, an article on the tension over memorializing individuals — in this case, a potential plan to create a monument to recently deceased black civil rights attorney Oliver Hill — when the very act of memorializing seems to conflict with dominant political or social leadership and their influence. While I’ve studied quite a bit about the Civil War, my ongoing interest in Civil War history tends to revolve more around issues of this kind, and the difficult challenge of handling historical memories … whether related to the Civil War or other key (especially controversial) historical events.

From Clio and Me, an article asking questions about a pair of dramatically different stereo images from the First World War. The meaning of imagery like this and how we relate to it in terms of historical memory and contemporary culture is, to me, something we would do well to understand more about, as more and more of our world is represented to us in pictures and video, rather than text.

From Ponder and Dream, wonderful original historical illustrations that just make you think. See for example, this one, which is prefaced by a Longfellow poem.  Or just start with sites home page and look at as many as you can.

From The Victorian Peeper, an image and article about a Victorian “dinosaur theme park,” originally intended to demonstrate themes in evolution. I’m pretty much fascinated by all things Victorian — European and American — and by the connections between Victorian England, Victorian America, and our contemporary culture. Such connections are much more compelling than our stereotypical view of the Victorian period tends to encompass, a topic that I hope to cover in future articles.