Ralph Luker, in the AHA's Perspectives (May 2005):

As the 20th century faded into the 21st, the Internet gave birth to a new form of communication, the weblog or"blog." A blog is a commonplace journal maintained on the Internet, where it is accessible to other readers. At the beginning of 1999, there were about two-dozen blogs known to exist. This was an intimate world, in which every blogger could be known to all other bloggers, but during that year the first free create-your-own-weblog tools became available and the numbers of bloggers grew into the hundreds.1

Blogs take a variety of forms, from daily personal journals to occasional essays. Some blogs are exclusively individual efforts; others are collective ventures or group blogs. Some are done anonymously or pseudonymously; other people blog in their own names. Some enable readers' comments in response to what they've read; others do not. Blogs by academics are a very small part of the blog world—or"blogosphere"—which by now according to various estimates includes over 5 million blogs, though the numbers change constantly and no one really knows for sure because the attrition rate is also high. By now, however, academic blogs include some high profile public intellectuals, such as Penn State's Michael Berube (http://www.michaelberube.com) and Chicago's Richard Posner (http://www.becker-posner-blog.com).

In mid-November 1999, 25-year-old Kevin C. Murphy was probably the first (future) historian to begin blogging. He was then an aide to James Carville, President Clinton's former senior political advisor, and is now a graduate student in 20th-century American political history at Columbia University. Despite his youth, the early launch of his Ghost in the Machine (http://www.ghostinthemachine.net) earns Murphy the honor of being the elder statesman of history bloggers. In the history blogosphere, November 1999 is ancient history. Indeed, Swarthmore's Timothy Burke archives all of his blog, Easily Distracted (http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1), prior to December 2003 as"ancient blog." It isn't that blogging historians are overwhelmed by"presentism," but that the form itself is so new and in flux.

Two years ago, when I first became a blogging historian, history bloggers were vaguely aware of each other. A few of us, like historian/journalists Eric Alterman (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870) and Josh Marshall (http://talkingpointsmemo.com), had a substantial audience. As our numbers grew and we slowly found each other, the virtual seminar of mutual teaching and learning built a sense of community. In September 2004, the group blog at the History News Network called Cliopatria (http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html)—the blog to which I belong—created a list or"blogroll" of all known history blogs. So far, we have found about 145 of them, including one each in Dutch, Finnish, French, and Portuguese....

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Related Links

Manan Ahmed: Blogging: It's Easier Than You Think!