On A Planetary Scale

And here’s one more concept course, but the great thing about this one is that I’m actually teaching it next year, with Bill Turkel. (Bill said in response to my last two posts, “I think your idea of ‘concept courses’ is great, except I think we should only teach concept courses, all of us, and standardized syllabuses and canons be damned.”)

Science, Technology, and Global History

There are mad and beautiful things beneath the skin of the world we know, that you only see when you look at things on a planetary scale.
– Warren Ellis, Planetary

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[Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome here or there.]

We Are Not (Yet) Amused

It's the twenty-fourth* of May,
The Queen's birthday!
If you don't give us a holiday,
We'll all run away!



Happy Victoria Day! Or, as Canadians of more republican sympathies call it, "May Two-Four." *Even though this year the actual May Two-Four has been annexed by Memorial Day weekend and so is being observed on May One-Nine instead. Confusing.

Perhaps some of you have noticed me piping up in the comment pages of your LiveJournals recently and surmised that the school year must be over. It's true, this is the time of year I go from being grossly overmatched by my duties to just mostly overmatched. In that spirit, I'd thought I might write up a bunch of Alternate Queen Victorias to mark the day. But I'm out of practice, and inspiration eludes me. So I throw it open to you, my clever friends. Alternate / Eliptonical / Secret / Weird Victorias. What springs to mind?

If that question doesn't grab you, here's another one. How might you go about illuminating / eliptonizing / secret historicizing the War of 1812? There's no shortage of Napoleonic weirdness, but I don't know if I've ever seen anything on North America's 1812. Any suggestion on books to check out or promising historical nuggets to begin with? Just something I'm playing with in my head.