Welcome to Concerning History!
We are a new history blog whose goal is to explore historical events and cultural memory in a more casual format. Although all of our writers are serious in their passion for history, we hope that this blog will be only occasionally stodgy. Our founding members are made up entirely of recent college graduates who have come to miss the academic stimulation of the history classroom and so have banded together to ford the post-graduation chasm and keep the spirit of historical learning alive and well in their everyday lives.
Wondering who our writers are? Meet the team on our Contributors page, where you’ll find a headshot and short bio for each of our contributing members. We hail from across the United States, spanning from California to Maine. Although our paths through life have varied, we have all studied history in the formal college environment and all of us have earned at least a Bachelor of Arts in History. As we bring on additional contributors, be sure to visit our Contributors page again to look through the newest bios!
For launch week, we’ll be publishing an unusually high number of posts to get the ball running:
- On Monday April 17 you’ll find both this post and five “Pillars of History” posts from five of our contributors; in these we’ll each explore the principle that has most informed our particular approach to history and its interpretation, giving you a chance to explore five of the key ‘pillars’ of historical research and analysis.
- Wednesday April 19 will feature a collaborative post entitled “We Love Them Anyway: Guilty Pleasures in TV and Film” in which we’ll examine a few pieces of historical fiction that leave much to be desired in terms of accuracy but that we nevertheless have soft spots for.
- Finally, we’re excited to close out our opening week on Friday April 21 with our first review. Bryan Caswell will be assessing FX’s Taboo (2017), a television drama series set in 1814 that tells the story of adventurer James Delaney (Tom Hardy) and his return to England after being presumed dead for twelve years in Africa.
Beginning next week, we’ll settle into our typical posting schedule going forward, which will see new posts of various formats on Mondays and new review posts on Fridays. Our posts will fall under the following categories:
- Commentaries: As lovers of history, our understandings of it and approaches to it are in a state of constant evolution. These posts will explore past and present historical methodologies as we add our commentaries on the discipline of history.
- Insights: This is where we’ll examine historical events themselves, sharing our interpretations of existing scholarship and publishing original research for you to enjoy.
- Reviews: A liberal arts education bears with it the blessing and curse of always thinking critically, so we’ve created this category to record our various reflections on books, movies, television shows, and other media in which history has been discussed and portrayed. We hope that our reviews pique your interest and inspire you to try out some of our suggestions. Who knows? You may even discover a new favorite.
- Pop Culture: From books and movies to television shows and video games, all types of media draw inspiration from the past. Whether by retelling historical events or merely drawing inspiration from them as a foundation for creating entirely new worlds, works of pop culture are ripe with historical engagement. Here you’ll find us at our most casual, obsessing over the history that can be found in our favorite stories and gushing over what could be the next great miniseries.
Keep an eye out for our collaborative posts, which will give us the chance not to only engage with previously-published scholarship but also with one another as we go up against some of history’s most challenging topics.
Finally, we’d like to encourage all of our readers to consider this blog an interactive interpretive effort. We welcome any and all feedback and strongly invite you leave suggestions for future posts. And don’t forget to also follow us on Facebook, where we’ll be keeping you up to date on our latest posts and upcoming content!