On History

Today I am flying to Virginia to give a talk at Virginia Tech. This talk is on my core research into medieval Venetian cultural history, a subject I mostly keep away from the blog (as I use it to write about other things). But here's one thing I'm going to say this evening to what I expect will be an audience of mostly undergraduates, as I explain why I study what I study:

"What interests me about the past is not what people do, but how we as humans tell stories about what we do, and how we craft our identities, at least in part, based on our understandings of the past."

 And that's very much why I write this blog, to try and understand, then articulate, why we do what we do, what it means, and what stories we tell ourselves about our actions.

Expect light blogging for the next few days, though I'll have at least a link and a comment each morning.