So, my wife is being considered for a job in Bath, England. I'm about to finish my PhD in California. This could be a really good opportunity for her and it's in a place we've always thought that we'd like to live--but the academic job market in the southwest of England looks almost non-existent. Am I torpedoing my hopes of an academic career if we move there? I know the job market is tough in the US, but at least here I can get part-time, adjunct work. It's not even clear that that is a possibility if we move to, say, Bristol. I've looked at jobs.ac.uk, the Guardian's website, and browsed a few more general job search sites; am I missing things?

Also, what kinds of protocol are there for working in British universities? Can I just email the chair of the history department at Bristol and say, "Hey, can you employ me?" Or is that sort of thing just not done there?

I'm dealing with an incredibly frustrating "game of telephone" today as I try to figure out the implications of a specific land grant to a Scandinavian chieftain. The contemporary sources give slightly conflicting info and then you can see the degradation of the story very visibly from source to source as time moves on. Then the modern historiography ends up being this weird hodgepodge "Purple Monkey Dishwasher" mess of all the sources combined into some bizarre hybrid account.

It has really made me think about how rigidly and technically we often use language and historical terms. When is a "benefice" (a specific type of land grant) a technical legal or political construction and when is it just a word that a chronicler decided to use? If we don't see that word used in a source, does that mean it wasn't used on the ground? If the term is used by a later source do they know something we don't or are they applying their own ideas anachronistically?

I'm on my way back home from a conference I'm particularly enjoying and had a thought that'd be nice to review it for my department's postgrad journal. I've never written a conference report before, though (or read many). What do you put in them? Can anyone point me to some good examples?

I'm currently very interested in prosopographies, mostly because I have been rolling around in this database like the proverbial pig in poop. Does anyone have any thoughts about this technique?

A second post today, maybe we'll talk about it tomorrow as well. I'm currently teaching Western Civilization from the Big Bang to the Present in fifteen weeks. Things have been going pretty well this semester, given that I've radically altered the structure of the course to minimize lecture in favor of student-driven primary source investigation. But, I think I need to focus each week's topics more clearly, so I'm thinking about picking single years to guide each week. Here's a partial list.

1. 200,000 BCE? Something about the emergence of homo sapiens so that I can frame the course around a very deep history.

2. 2500 BCE--to deal with the development of cities and agriculture in Mesopotamia and Egypt, through the Epic of Gilgamesh, since the "real" Gilgamesh is estimated to have ruled about this time.

3. 480 BCE--Thermopylae, since my students are all art students, love the movie 300, and a lesson around comparing the cinematic representation of that battle with historical documents is instructive.

4. 44BCE to 27BCE--Something in this range, maybe slightly earlier or later, on which to focus the history of Rome. Our reading for this period has been Apuleius, which has worked fairly well, so I'm open to different dates here.

5. 795 CE--The Viking raid on Iona as a lens into the post-Roman, early Medieval period. They'll watch The Secret of Kells, not exactly a historical film but a wonderful way to consider the ways that history is represented and still surprisingly insightful into historical processes. I know you're skeptical, but this lesson always works really well with these students.

6. 1346 CE-- The Battle of Crecy as a lens into later Medieval Europe; we read Froissart, so this would be a good moment for us.

7. 1519 CE--Cortes and Moctezuma meet, a way into exploration, conquest, disease, the Columbian exchange, and I could spin it back to Europe in terms of burgeoning religious conflict with Luther just two years before.

8. Not sure here, something early modern. Maybe 1648 to illustrate the period of religious wars and the development of modern notions of state sovereignty.

9. 1789--French Revolution, I'd pitch it as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment

10. 1851--Industrial Revolution through the Great Exhibition

11. 1884--New Imperialism and European hegemony through the Berlin West African conference

12. 1914--World War I

13. 1945--World War II, atomic bomb

14. 1968--The postwar world, Vietnam, protest

15. And one extra week that can go anywhere. Where should I put it? What big event am I missing?

I like the idea of this format because I can lecture for a short time to set up particular events; I can still have the students working with a broad range of sources to illustrate not just the largely political moments these dates turn on, but also to flesh out the eras with social and cultural history. At the same time, these events will give us anchor points for a narrative that obviously proceeds at breakneck speed.

Thoughts?

Also--we should have a weekly feature for teaching and pedagogy!

So, /u/bitparity has brought this up a couple of times, but it's an interesting subject to talk about, and is multifaceted (by the way, I'm sure I won't put this half as well as he does, so fair warning). Using the "rebuilding" of old, rammed-earth historical sites with non-period brickwork in China as an example, what is the role of "serving the truth" in historical study, and is the concept region specific (west vs east? Etc)? Is there any significant difference between the sections of the Great Wall rebuilt in modernity and those surviving from Ming restoration/building?