One of the objectives of this blog is to encourage alumni and students of this department to cultivate habits of lifelong learning. While many of our former students don’t work in jobs directly related to history, we assume that their undergraduate interest in the past never entirely went away — and ought to be nourished by continued reading, museum visits, film watching, and other activities.
That’s why we collect a series of historical blog posts from around the Internet and post them as “Weekend Reading” every Saturday morning.
To a similar end, each month we’ll be highlighting other blogs that discuss history in an interesting, well-researched, and well-written fashion.
This month, a blog featuring the writers and editors of one of the world’s great academic publishing houses, Oxford University Press:
OUPblog
Frequency of Posts: daily
Five Most Recent Posts:
- Enoch Powell (the story of a controversial 20th century English nationalist)
- Who really discovered the Egyptian Hieroglyphs? (the enduring rivalry between an English linguist and his French counterpart)
- Off with Their Heads! (Or not…) (a Bastille Day special: separating fact from fiction in the history of the guillotine)
- Titanic: One Family’s Story (specifically, that of a Lebanese Christian woman and her children traveling on the ill-fated ship to rejoin her husband, who had emigrated to Michigan)
- The sleeping giant wakes (a historical perspective on the rise of China as a potential superpower)
The OUP’s blog features posts on the wide range of topics covered by its extensive catalog, not just history. But history is one of its strengths (the link above goes straight to the history page — if you want to see other topics, click here), with posts on African, African-American, British, European, Latin American, Middle Eastern, Military, U.S., and World history being published regularly. There’s also a biography section, and a “This Day in History” feature that’s updated a bit less frequently than you’d expect. Most posts come from authors promoting new Oxford-published books, and they’re generally quite well-written — while this is an academic press, you don’t generally need to be a specialist in the field to follow along.
Some other academic presses with blogs that regularly cover history:
- The Chicago Blog (nothing since late May, but here’s the history page for the University of Chicago Press’ blog)
- Harvard University Press (no separate history page, but posting most frequently on American, European, World, Ancient, and African history, plus history of science; also see Off the Page, HUP’s author forum)
- University of California Press Blog (mostly news and author interviews, with history being one of the most popular categories)
- UNC Blog (book excerpts, videos, and other posts on history from the University of North Carolina Press)
- Yale Press Log (here’s the history page; also check out the “Eminent Biography” and “Lest We Forget” column)
