The last 48 hours have been very gratifying.

• I've learned that the panel I'm on has indeed been accepted to the biggest international conference in my field, so it looks like I'll be off to Vancouver next January.

• I've been approached to contribute to yet another radio documentary project about the war.

• A chapter I submitted for an upcoming volume was enthusiastically accepted in spite of being a bit over-long.

• And another article on which I've been working for far too long has finally been sent off to the editors -- though I won't likely know what will happen with it until the end of the summer.

All in all, a happy time. The spring teaching load has been hectic and the huge amount of conference travel has been tiring, but in a few short weeks I will well and truly be able to take a bit of a break at last. Between now and then, though, I have to finish teaching a much compacted course, present three papers (at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities this weekend, at the British Library in June, and at the Canadian War Museum in July), and conclude the full draft of my dissertation. It's quite exhilarating, in a way.

TL;DR: Does anyone remember what having a summer break was like? I sure don't.

Here is something I have been mulling on for a bit: bias is a complicated concept in history and archaeology, and we are all familiar with the problematic nature of discussing it. But we are also generally aware that a series of biases have often been applied that have lead to misinterpretations of evidence or overlooking of potential narratives--colonial biases ignoring the diversity of colonized lands, gender biases ignoring the stories of women, class biases focusing only on the elite, etc.

One that doesn't seem to be discussed very much, and that I have begun to see everywhere, is an urban bias. Academics, by and large, are an urban bunch, and even those working in institutions in small towns don't exactly live rural lifestyles or engage in rural economies. And while the lives of the urban poor or non-elite tend to get rich descriptions, or at least an acknowledge that they deserve one, the rural poor often get written off and treated as an undifferentiated mass of semi-starving subsistence farmers perpetually under the whip. Or how common it is to treat cities as diverse centers of dynamism and cultural change, while the countryside is homogenized and stagnant (utterly ignoring the diversity and change in rural societies!)? Certainly, this bias has deep roots, as traditionally urban societies have closer access to producers of historical information, but it still seems to be a tendency having been perpetuated. For example, it is only very recently, as in within the last decade or so, that drives towards archaeological investigation of the poor of the Roman countryside have begun.

The direct inspiration to post this was /u/brigantus' question because really, how frequently do we hear about rationing in London? I am curious to hear whether there have been treatments of this topic, or just thoughts in general.

EDIT: I had a brief half sentence suggesting certain tendencies in marxian thought might be partially to blame for exacerbating this, but I probably don't know enough to claim that. Would love to hear thoughts on that angle as well, though!