Happy Winter Solstice! We're going to get about 8 hours and 16 minutes of daylight in Bemidji today. But tomorrow more. Since this is more or less New Years Day for me, I'm going to try to start all my "resolutions" today.
And since Substack is going to be my focus this year, I may as well get on a schedule. Where am I at and where am I going? MakingHistory has 748 posts in its archive. Since I typically have a "firewall" up, where after a month only paid subscribers can read my old content, I suppose that means that until I have more paid subscribers, a lot of this stuff is just sort-of languishing there. That means a lot of stuff I posted when I had only a handful of readers is now locked away.
So I'm going to open the archives for a while. In celebration of the Solstice, I'm opening all my content for ten days. The solstice is sort-of my New Year, but New Years Day for the rest of the world is in about a week and a half. So, between now and then, I'll unlock the archives and invite people to poke around and discover things they may have missed. For example:
Primary Sources:
I began focusing on the actual writings of people in American History back in June of 2022. Since then I don't know how many primary source excerpts I've posted, but it's got to be a couple of hundred. You can find them all here.
Freethinkers:
This consists mostly of videos of me reading chapters of my biography of Dr. Charles Knowlton, An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy. I took all those and stitched them together into an audiobook which I published on my Spotify podcast. I've reproduced it on my Substack podcast and you can watch the videos here. In the future, I'll be posting more of my research on the transatlantic secular radicals in this "folder".
Note-making:
My posts on my own process, the tools I explored, and the techniques I developed go back to June of 2020. Many of these will ultimately find their way over to Lifelong Learners, but for now they're still where I first put them, here.
Historiography:
I started posting little historiographical book reviews in July of 2023. Many of them were reworkings of reviews I had done for myself when I was reading for my field exams as a graduate student. There are probably about a hundred posted and more to come. It has been interesting to me, reviewing the books that informed my own historical ideas. It's useful, now and then, to review where you've been.
I hope people find this material interesting. For those who have subscribed since I posted a lot of it, I’m looking forward to comments! And if you want to support my work and have ongoing access, consider a paid subscription if you’re able. Thanks and Happy Solstice! —Dan
Happy Solstice! Archives Are OPEN