Man at a Crossroads

Welcome to my newsletter and why I created it

I’ve toyed around with the idea of creating a platform to showcase works in progress, lecture videos, and other educational media for a long time. Like many people, COVID-19 completely transformed my academic life. Since 2020 and the end of my formal classwork, I have yet to return in person to campus, with exception of returning a stack of long overdue library books. At first, this was due to the dictates of pandemic safety, but over time it became financial necessity.

With two kids, I needed to take on more work than my meager stipend and part-time wages could provide. Commuting made no sense with teaching course load asynchronous and with my own coursework complete, there seemed little sense in making the hour and a half commute to campus. At first I upped my hours at my part-time job, which eventually gave way to me taking a full-time job that could provide far more than my piecemeal existence had previously. However, even with a fairly significant raise, inflation has made it nearly impossible to do anything but to tread water.

I say all this not to elicit sympathy, but instead to help you understand why I have decided to try to get this project off the ground. With all that is going on in my own life and the world around me, it can be difficult to find the motivation to sit down and write after a long day of work. What I see this newsletter as is an opportunity to get down thoughts that might not make it to a formal publication, ideas not fully fleshed out, but full of potential. You can see what I am reading and working on long before it is finished product. In a way, I am giving you a glimpse into the historian’s workshop and at what the craft can look like. Not only that, because of the kind of history I do, I think what I am working is worth a read at the very least to help understand our contemporary moment.

Along with showcasing my works in progress, I see this platform as a way to share the best of online lectures. While some of early efforts at the beginning of pandemic were rough, with better equipment and editing software I have made my lectures a way not just to explain readings to students, but to give them visual and audio artifacts that illustrate the most important themes of the given topic. Since my work focuses primarily on the twentieth century, I am able to use film, music, among other mediums in a way that I think that helps students understand the subject better. Among other things, I cover everything from the First World War to the Cultural Revolution from as much a global perspective as possible. From reviews of my courses, I can say that much of my students come away saying that they have learned so many things about the world that they didn’t previously. Something that I hope even the more well read in my audience will be able to say.

Finally, I hope that this platform will help bring potential collaborators into my orbit. Much of scholastic life can be isolating, which can in turn diminish scholarship. Nothing is better than cooperative work. If you find something I’ve written interesting and congenial to a project you are working on as well, there is potential to put our heads together and put out a work that showcases the best of what we both have to offer.

My first official piece is a draft that I’ve worked on for an upcoming conference. I’ve posted that work as a means of highlighting the direction I am going in as well as a way to elicit feedback. If you like what you read consider subscribing to help me continue to do what I love to do, which is try to understand and help others understand the distant land that is our collective past.

All the best,

Connor Harney