Past the Comps and into History.

Graph snapshot view of my Comprehensive Exams notes in Obsidian.md. Photo: Scott Coleman, 2023.

I am a Ph.D. candidate. What does this mean?

Well, I am exhausted, and I can now focus on my own research. I have proven that I am capable of beginning research on my Ph.D. topic, which is…something to do with coins and museums.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind, both professionally and personally, but through all of it, I have been thinking about what to write next. What direction do I want this blog to move toward? It seems that I am continuously debating the identity of the site. What is my mission, purpose, and goal? To make History F’n fun again as I have written before. Lots of people are doing that. This is an ignorant claim I made in the past based on the assumption that History revolved around a narrative constructed on the Past which lost its popular appeal, and I could remedy the problem by blogging. This couldn’t be further from the case.

History has always been fun. Whether you read about it, listen to a podcast about a historical topic, play a video game with historical content (Assassin’s Creed, perhaps?), or have a conversation with friends and family about a memory or a past event that brought joy or heartache—walking through a park and sitting on a bench with a plaque and a name engraved on it. The point here is that history is engaging for most people, but the “fun” is a subjective, a profoundly personal claim. History doesn’t have to be a grand historical narrative. It can be a chapter in a family’s history or what happened just last year in a city’s downtown core. It can be a memory that provokes a new thought, an indulgence into a nostalgic moment, or an aura when cooking Nan’s recipe for Sunday dinner. Paraphrasing David Dean, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Charles Hedrick: The Past does not exist without the present. How we engage with it and construct a narrative about it is performed daily by everybody. It really just boils down to what we claim to be significant and elevated to the platform of History with a capital H, or what is called memory or nostalgia. A Public History, perhaps?

I think I will end this post here. Anticlimactic, I know. But what I gained from thinking about the Past and History (a theme from my comprehensive exam) is that this blog reflects the journey about my engagement with the immediate past through my experiences with interacting and researching the distant past. Hedrick (2006) notes that we can not write History without writing about ourselves. We imprint ourselves in some manner into the historical narrative which we create. For my historical narrative, i.e. the Blog, I think I will take a zettle note (I will discuss this in the next post on Obsidian.md) from my vault and elaborate on it, expand it into a reflective post and share how my research is constructed through Obsidian.md; how I am building a historical narrative about the past and simultaneously creating a record around the processes which I am participating in.

Hmmm, that sounds like Fun!