What is this Place? An Introduction

Hello!

I’m Amanda, and I would like to welcome you to Sort of Academic. I’m glad to see you stumbled into this new little corner of the Internet. What is this little corner of the Internet? It’s a place for me to share my love of history and learning, and hopefully encourage others to either re-examine their interest in the past or add to someone else’s existing interest in the subject.

Why do I want people to re-examine their interest in history?

Think back to grade school. You’re sitting in history class, and probably bored out of your mind. Why do you have to learn all of these facts? Are these dates really important? When am I ever going to use this? Maybe you asked your teacher that last question and they answered with something along the lines of “because you have to”.

That last bit is in quotes because I am quoting my eighth-grade history teacher. What a terrible answer. Now let me provide a little context as to why that teacher may have thought that answer was sufficient.

My home state requires coaches to teach a core subject, and it is not uncommon for them to choose history because it is “easy”. Some have a genuine interest, but teaching history is never their real priority. Coaching sports is their priority.

So, history became a running list of facts to get through. The goal was to get through as much information as possible. Limited context and information was provided for the impact of various events or people. Critical thinking and analysis weren’t really a thing.

No wonder so few people enjoy history in school. I could add more examples, but I think you get the gist.

Okay, Millennial.

What’s the point in complaining about all of this? Why am I still stuck on something that happened years ago?

Well, as noted at the beginning of this post, I really enjoy history. I read ahead in my world history textbook because I thought it was interesting. I knew we were skipping or glossing over a lot of information. Sometimes this was due to time constraints, sometimes it was due to lack of interest from the teacher. I decided I wanted to be a high school history teacher so I knew history was worth learning, and I could give a better answer than “because you have to” when asked why we were learning about a topic. 

Here, have a reality check.

Then, reality started to set in while I was in college. I was glad to be done with high school and didn’t really want to go back and spend twenty years there. I changed my major from secondary education to history and had the goal of getting my doctorate and becoming a professor. Generally, teaching at the collegiate level provides more academic freedom. You can touch on tough subjects that might be difficult to get approved to teach at the high school level. I also wanted the opportunity to teach students about the everyday life of ordinary people, and not just focus on the typical “important” people and events.

There was just one little problem.

My interests in history are a bit all over the place. For example, when preparing a research paper for a class, I started on the black plague, and ended up writing about the pharaoh Akhenaten. I thought I would make Egyptology my specialty. But then I realized a lot of people study Egyptology, and who wants to be like everyone else? More importantly to me, how I could bring anything new to the table in that field?

I kept bouncing around areas of interest until I bounced myself right out of studying history all together. Spending years and tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree when I wasn’t even sure if I was making the right choice about my area of study just didn’t seem like a good idea. I still read and enjoyed history, but didn’t know how I could make a living in the field. So, I moved on.

Or did I? (dun dun dunnnn)

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Not really. The majority of books I buy and read are history related. I’m still excited about history, and I still want to get other people interested in the subject. This has helped motivate me to create this blog. I want to study my history hobby more seriously and share what I learn along the way.

The fact of the matter is there is a lot of history to cover in school, so it is not surprising teachers feel like they must rush and have limited time to delve into the details of events or people. But I have the time to take those deep dives now. I started taking those dives during the pandemic, and I realized I was missing a lot of details about what lead to different events. If someone who likes to read and learn about history missed those details, someone who is newly interested in the subject is probably missing them as well.

So, let’s learn together. And let’s take a slightly different approach. Only sort of an… academic approach, if you will.

Let’s do this.

I will have posts that explore what a historian is, learning how to do research, analysis, critical thinking, and more. These won’t be the same stodgy lectures you are used to. Some of the topics will have some stodginess to them out of necessity, but I’m not a professor here to impress you with my learning. I’m your peer who wants to share information.

I also have a section called Appendix A: Book Opinions where I share books that I have read and my thoughts. I’m not going to call them book reviews, because they really are just my opinions.

Appendix B: Curiosity Curio is where I share things that I have learned or like about other topics and interests.

Finally, I want to stress that this blog is for learning. Mistakes will be made, and they will be unintentional. I will make updates as needed to correct these mistakes. Suggestions and constructive criticism are welcome. Please be kind and respectful and remember the human on the other side of the computer screen. If you can’t or don’t want to, now is the time to move on. 

If you want to stick around, I’ll be adding new posts to the Chapters AKA Posts page once a month. The Book Opinions and Curiosity Curio sections will be updated when I have something new to share, meaning these posts will be irregular. These posts will be added on Fridays.

Coming Up

I’ll see you in two weeks with a post giving an introduction to what history is, why we study it, and to answer the question “what is a historian anyway?”