The Deerfield Raid, in Multiple Forms
I looked forward to this week’s reading, about creating the website “Raid on Deerfield: the Many Stories of 1704,” because it connected the strands of my career to-date in academic, digital, and public history. When I took David Silverman’s Colonial North America seminar (syllabus in Microsoft Word format) in spring 2005, we read a scholarly [...]
Virginia: Farming only since 1614?
The other night on my way to class, I found myself behind a truck with one of Virginia’s many custom license plates. But this one’s tagline intrigued me: “Farming since 1614.” As the pickup and I crawled down Lee Highway, I started to wonder, “Why 1614?”–particularly in light of Jamestown’s founding seven years before. As [...]
Thinking about design… For those who haven’t needed to
This week’s readings for Clio I got into basic nuts and bolts of disseminating history on the Web, particularly planning and design of websites. For me, they were quite useful as I think about putting my own projects on the Web. Some of the design principles discussed in the readings were familiar to me from [...]
Remembering the Alamo… Education Department
During an unexpected trip to San Antonio this past week, I made a couple of pilgrimages to visit my former colleagues at the Alamo. I began my public history career there–indeed, discovered public history–when I was hired as a history interpreter during the summer of 2000. I repeated that role after I graduated from Pitt [...]
Diving into digital history
What is digital history, and how did it evolve? The readings for this week’s Clio Wired I addressed those issues in a broad way, providing a running start for the semester. Per the ethos of digital humanities, this week’s readings are available, ungated, to everyone–and also available in printed format. Susan Hockey’s “History of Humanities [...]
The serendipity of history
When poking around on the Library of Congress Map Collections to find a header image the other day, I stumbled upon Dr. John H. Robinson’s 1819 map of the southern United States and what was then northern New Spain. Being that my research interests focus on the United States and Mexico, I chose this map. [...]
Welcome
Welcome to my site. This site belongs to David McKenzie, a public historian. I’ve begun it for Sharon Leon’s Clio Wired I course, part of the History Ph.D. program at George Mason University. However, I plan to write beyond what I’m doing for class. I will offer commentary (warranted or not, your choice) on a [...]