Updates and Things

Hello there, fellow bookworms! I’m running off to Cuba tomorrow for some much-needed rest and relaxation (as it turns out, being an administrative assistant is no fun at all) so I’m going to be neglecting my duties as a blogger even more than usual for the next little while. Not to worry, though! I have several more posts planned for when I get back. And in the meantime, here’s some stuff you may or may not care about.

Things have been pretty crazy lately, in both the internet and non-internet worlds. Radical Bookworm is growing, slowly but steadily, despite my apparent inability to post consistently (I blame my job). It’s even developing something of a Google presence. I don’t know what exactly people expect when they search for “gender proportion usa historical” or “why canadians enjoy olympics”, but this is what they’re getting. (On a more sincere note, I was pretty psyched to find that my post on forced sterilization had been linked by FWD/Forward, which is an awesome blog that you should start reading, if you haven’t already.)

In other news, the University of Toronto’s undergraduate history journal is publishing one of my papers! Exciting, I know. Granted, those journals are pretty much just for nerds looking for something to put on their grad school applications (I admit nothing) but it’s still pretty damn cool. Fellow U of T nerds, take note: the journal is being released at the faculty-student social being held in the JCR at University College this coming Thursday. I will not be there, as I will be too busy lying on the beach drinking unlimited quantities of beer, but my sister has promised that she will go and pretend to be me. She’s tall, has short brown hair, and will probably be saying things like “Sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am” because that’s how she thinks I talk. If you see her, say hi and remind her to record Supernatural for me.

Finally, you may know that March is Women’s History Month. I haven’t done much about it, since pretty much every month is Women’s History Month as far as I’m concerned. I have, however, been looking for an excuse to link to the Annales historiques de la Révolution française, which is an extremely old-school Marxist French historians’ review, whose archives, I recently discovered, are all available online. Even more awesome is the fact that back in 2006, they did an entire issue on women’s public political roles during the Revolution: La prise de parole publique des femmes. Unfortunately, it’s all in French, which I realize probably excludes the majority of the readership of an English-language blog, but it’s still pretty great to see real historical scholarship made available to the public.

Similarly, Robert Darnton and the American Historical Review have set up an interesting little site on news and media in eighteenth-century Paris, which includes an article summing up a lot of Darnton’s work on the subject as well as a number of primary documents he references. I realize that I am probably the only person who’s interested in this kind of thing, but it’s still great that it’s out there. Since leaving school, I’ve become incredibly frustrated at how elitist and inaccessible academic publications can be. This, if you ask me, is exactly what the internet is for, and it’s great to see it being used in that way.

Thanks for reading, everyone. I doubt I’ll post at all this week, but come back next week for more geekiness, exclamation points and righteous feminist rage.