Hey, remember us?
A few months ago we decided it was time to take a break here at The Junto. Our first five years were far better than we ever expected—you can get a run-down of our achievements here—but we were a bit burned out, to be honest. Most of us have been blogging since the beginning, and we only have so many good ideas to blog about. We were also ready for the next phase of The Junto‘s history. Continue reading
Greetings, faithful readers.
As you may have noticed, things have been a bit quiet here during the last few months, but much work has been going on behind the scenes. In the coming weeks, we will be adding a number of exciting new blog members—from incoming grad students to junior faculty at a broad range of institutions. In addition, we will be unveiling a new look for the blog’s website. Please bear with us as we edit the site, and get new members’ profiles up and running. Of course, our back catalog of almost 1,000 posts dealing with all aspects of early American, digital, and public history is always available. Unfortunately, these changes do mean that we will be skipping our traditional Junto March Madness; we know some of you will be disappointed, and some of you thrilled, but we hope that our new regular content will more than make up for this omission.
We will be introducing new members and our new site in mid-April. We hope to see you back here then. In the meantime, we would like to remind all of our readers that we are always looking for guest posters to contribute to the blog. For more information about how you can contribute to The Junto, click here.
Since the blog first launched in December 2012, we have published 794 posts. That is somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 words of original content on early American history posted on the blog in less than 4 years. And since new readers find the blog regularly and our longtime readers may often have missed posts for various reasons, I want to use today’s post to simply make our readers aware of our back catalog and highlight the resources the blog has for accessing and making better use of it. Continue reading
If you haven’t noticed, the blog has been a bit, well, quiet lately. We promise that wasn’t all a hiccup! Well, most of it, anyway. About halfway through the summer we realized our productivity was lagging so we decided to call it a summer sabbatical—we are academics, after all.
Anyway, I’m pleased to say that, as the Fall Semester is about to commence for many of us, The Junto is ready to kick off another great year. We have posts scheduled nearly every day for the foreseeable future, and I swear some of them will probably be good. We’re gonna attack the season like the 2015-2016 Golden State Warriors, though we hope our ending won’t be so anti-climactic.
We do have some exciting things in store as the blog transitions into its next phase. Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, you can check out our new Contribute page to find out more about how to write a guest post for us.
As always, we appreciate any and all feedback. We truly appreciate all our faithful readers—we now have over four thousand subscribers to the blog, and even more casual visitors—and feel this is one of many digital centers for the early American history community. Or, ahem, #VastEarlyAmerica.
We’re very pleased to announce yet another addition to The Junto and to welcome Hannah Bailey as our newest contributor. Continue reading
I acknowledge the generous help of Michael Hattem in gathering all the statistics and relevant information for this post. And just as he is the real puppeteer behind the curtain of the post, he serves a similar function for the entire blog in general; appreciation is herein expressed, once again, to him.
Two years ago today, The Junto announced its entrance into the academic blogging world. When I originally conceived of the idea for the blog and pitched it to three fellow grad students (Michael Blaakman, Katy Lasdow, and Eric Herschthal) in an uptown Manhattan coffee shop in September(ish) 2012, I merely wanted to come up with a small community that could alleviate my alone-ness of studying American history while living in the UK. A few months later, the blog was born; two years later, our empire expands. It is becoming fairly common to meet people at an academic conference and, after I share my name, the person replies, “Oh, you’re Ben Park from The Junto?” It makes me smile every. single. time. I could have hardly conceived of where the blog has gone since our humble beginnings. Yet here we are. What follows is a general report of what has taken place since we last celebrated our blog’s birthday. Continue reading
We are very happy to announce the second of two most recent additions to The Junto, Jessica Parr. Continue reading
We’re very excited to announce that Casey Schmitt has accepted an invitation to become The Junto‘s newest contributor. Continue reading
The Junto 