MakingHistory Vault

I am beginning to populate an Obsidian Publish vault to be the archive of my work in history. It is located here, and for the present is open to everybody. In the future it will probably be limited to contributors (especially if I don’t end up with full-time employment as a teacher next year!).

I think it will provide an interesting linked archive, which readers can use to jump from topic to topic, explore connections between ideas, and trace the development of trains of thought. This is something Substack doesn’t seem that well-suited to facilitate. I’ll continue posting new content onto Substack, much of which I imagine will actually be triggered and inspired by the work I’ll be doing to prepare the archival topics to be seen by people, and updating the links.

The first batch of things I published were mostly related to my own journey through historiography as I was learning about the discipline. One thing leads to another, as I try to make the links work. The list of topics on the lefthand sidebar are all the pages that exist. Some of the light gray nodes in the graph do not yet have their own pages. Many of these are people who were mentioned in a big book on historiography called That Noble Dream, whom I have not yet made pages for. I’ll review this and make pages for some (and possibly unlink others) as soon as I get a chance. A couple of other links to pages that actually already exist in my private vault aren’t live yet, such as Christopher Clark’s books. As soon as I edit the reviews I did of those while I was a grad student and make them presentable, they’ll be live.

I hope this will be useful to people interested in history and in how a working historian works. Any comments or suggestions will be welcome.

Thanks! —Dan