I've just learned that the History News Network's group blog Cliopatria gave its "Best Writer" award for 2007 to Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. Many thanks for the honor! Since there's a danger that visitors from Cliopatria might come here looking for my posts about history and find only literacy statistics, I'll list here a few of my history-related posts from 2007.
- Notebook: Andrew Jackson and Habeas Corpus, 22 January 2007
- Spurs to Love, 2 February 2007
- Where's Thomas (Eakins)? 9 March 2007
- Queer or Peculiar? (Rezin Shepherd and Judah Touro), 6 March 2007
- Turned Around (Driving in Nazi Prague), 5 March 2007
- Torture, Novels, and Contingency, 9 April 2007 and 25 April 2007, and the related Ghastly Sights, 15 May 2007
- What You Can See of Grozny, 22 April 2007
- Abolition and Gay Marriage, 26 April 2007 and Oregon, Free State, 3 May 2007
- Are You Aware How Fast Your Vehicle Was Going, Sir? 6 May 2007
- Notebook: Aimee Semple McPherson, 29 June 2007
- Notebook: There She Blew, 15 July 2007
- History's Bad Physicians, 7 November 2007
I'll add, since I'm unlikely to have another occasion for such retrospection, that the posts of last year that meant the most to me in the writing of them were personal rather than history-related: Treed, 30 July 2007 and Lota, 1996-2007, 15 December 2007. And according to my admittedly impressionistic counting of "hits," the most popular post I wrote was literary-critical: Turgenev: The Translation Game, 3 May 2007.
Sir,
The lines between history and literary comment are not so easily drawn. The best history is always litcrit because historians must critique texts. Those historians that eschew the theory of how they do this, especially those that express their disdain for the linguistic turn of late-twentieth century literary theory in historiography, doom themselves to irrelevance.
Congratulations on the deserved honor.
I found your site from the HNN's link in late December, and I've been enjoying getting caught up on your work.
Posted by: James Stripes | Tuesday, 08 January 2008 at 08:07 AM
Congratulations, Caleb!
Posted by: Liz | Tuesday, 08 January 2008 at 08:38 AM
Thanks, Liz. I enjoyed your review of the Ethel Merman bio in Newsday! Especially her line about why she didn't get stage fright.
Posted by: Caleb Crain | Tuesday, 08 January 2008 at 09:02 AM
Congratulations!
Posted by: Jenny Davidson | Tuesday, 08 January 2008 at 10:56 AM
Hey, Caleb... great. I was just checking out your blog and read this good news... haven't been by here in awhile.
Posted by: WIll Pflaum | Friday, 18 January 2008 at 06:04 PM