New Blog: The Digital Grad Lounge

You may remember Erin Bartram and Mary Sanders from our AHA coverage here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.  Erin is a doctoral student in history at the University of Connecticut and Mary is a doctoral student in history at Oklahoma State University.

I want to call your attention to their new blog: "Digital Grad Lounge."  What I like about this blog is the fact that Erin and Mary have an open call for contributors. They want to have a conversation with fellow history grad students. Here is a taste of their introductory post:

This blog is growing out of the conversations between two young historians at the 2013 meeting of the American Historical Association.  Erin Bartram is a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, where she studies religion and gender in 19th-century United States history.  Mary Sanders is a PhD student at Oklahoma State University, where she studies the religious responses to terrorism.  We think that we are not the only two people who are having these conversations.  The Digital Grad Lounge is our attempt to reach out to those of you who might be out there, like us, having long, passionate conversations about the life that we've chosen to live. 

We are inspired by William Cronon's 2013 AHA Presidential Address, which focused on the importance of storytelling.  We think that graduate students have important stories, and that we should share them. 

One of Cronon's inspirations was the 1931 Presidential Address by Carl Becker, "Everyman His Own Historian."  We thought we would inaugurate this blog by reading Becker's address, which can be found at this link. 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it? Read Becker's address and give us your thoughts on how it relates to our contemporary mission as historians.  Please limit your responses to 200-400 words, and email them to digitalgradlounge@gmail.com by January 20, 2013.  Please include a one-sentence bio about you and your work.

Anonymous submissions will not be posted; this rule will stand in general on the blog.  We hope to cultivate a professional place for conversation, and do not feel that anonymous submissions have a place here. 

On January 21, we will publish whatever you have sent us in the hopes of beginning a conversation about the discipline and our place in it.  Thank you...and good luck!

OK history graduate students.  It is time to weigh in on Becker's seminar article.