Blogs > Cliopatria > Weak Endnotes

Dec 27, 2008

Weak Endnotes




Christopher Miller,"Historians and Facebook," History and Education, 16 December, compares the numbers of Facebook group memberships achieved by word-of-mouth for the AHA, OAH, and H-Net. He contrasts these with the group memberships achieved by"sustained efforts" for Cliopatria, HNN, and Progressive Historians.* Miller concludes that the AHA and OAH"are missing out by not extending content to this platform." I'm not so sure about that, but that may be because I really don't understand what Facebook is all about. I have an account and have friends on Facebook, but it isn't clear to me how it is particularly useful to historians.
*Other history blogs that have Facebook groups include: Chapati Mystery, Civil War History, Civil War Memory, In the Middle, and TOCWOC -- A Civil War Blog.

David Abulafia reviews Marcy Norton's Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World for THES, 18 December.

Adam Hochschild,"Americans in the gulag," TLS, 23 December, reviews Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags, Hope and betrayal in Stalin's Russia.

Dwight Gardner,"A Wartime Tale That Had to Be Told," NYT, 25 December, reviews Thomas Keneally's Searching for Schindler, an account of how the story of"Schindler's List" came to be told.

Finally, can a Marxist think of fox hunting as a healthy sport? Apparently so. The late Christopher Hill did.



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Jeremy Young - 12/27/2008

You're right and Miller's wrong. Facebook is great for sending group messages to all members of your group, so if you want to alert people to your latest symposium or carnival or the like, it's useful for that. (Good luck getting random lurkers to give you their e-mail addresses.) Obviously, the OAH and AHA don't need that capability, since they have comprehensive e-mail lists of all their members.

Don't get me wrong: I've built PH's Facebook group near-obsessively. But I'm not adding any "content" to the group; it's just a way to have a list in the infrequent event that I want to message my blog's readers. It may also drive content to my site, but I've yet to see any evidence of that (checking my site stats is another thing I do obsessively).