Category: Reflections

Spring B-Term 2025 Update

It’s been a while since the last post, the fall term ended, we had a lovely winter break, and I’m at the mid-point of the Spring B-sub-term. This term’s class is Teaching History, and the project is developing a class in two forms: an 8-week online course and a 16-week residential course. I chose to design the class The Industrial Revolution in America 1790-1860. It is an undergraduate survey of the period, beginning with a brief history of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain for background, followed by Samual Slater’s immigration to America, covering the progression of the social, economic, and technological developments of the period, and ending with a look at how the effects of the Industrial Revolution contributed to slavery leading into the Civil War. This is an overview of one of the most important periods of American history.

The Spring D-sub-term’s class, Historical Professions, starts March 17th. It is “an overview of the discipline of history, patterns of historical research, history instruction, historical organizations and careers in history.”1

The site is progressing slowely as things develop. I am looking forward to posting articles in the near future to help build the content of the site. For now the blog is more of a reflections of the academic journey as move slowly closer to a doctorate.

  1. From the course description in the Liberty Catalog. https://www.liberty.edu/online/courses/hist701/ ↩︎

The Power of Food

To know someone, break bread with them.

Enjoying a meal with someone, or a group, is a great way to get them to open up, get to know them, and see who they are. I like to cook for special occasions, and eat of course. I am by no means a chef but many, many moons ago I worked as a line cook. I have always enjoyed the culinary arts and through personal experience, I have found that cooking foods that are historically appropriate in using historically appropriate ways can create sensory links to the period that enhance the memory and context.

Revolution period reenactors will likely recognize the online store and YouTube channel for Townsends. They have done a wonderful job of outfitting revolution reenactors for decades and John spends a lot of time on recipes and cooking in the 18th century. Over the years I have been inspired down more than one rabbit hole thanks to John’s research, it was one of my early inspirations to resume handwriting which led to further research, and an interest in transcription, graphology, and documentary editing.

The desire to be more experimental in the kitchen and to apply a food context to period research also grew out of watching the 18th century cooking videos John and Ryan put out. This is something I will be trying to engange with more in the new year.

~Jon

Timelines

As of this posting, this Timeline project is still in development. I wanted to post it to the site early and see how it goes. I am using TimelineJS which is a nice tool. I tried embedding it to the post but the post space is too narrow and it didn’t look right, not to mention you had to scroll up and down just to see the entire height of the timeline. The project link is here.

Timelines offer so many valuable visual possibilities for digital humanities and public history, there are two block plugins for WordPress which I will try to check out soon and see how they go, but for now, I’ll just post links to my TimelineJS timelines.

Expect an ETA on this post in the next few days.
~Jon