Happy Milestones, Cliopatria, Happy Milestones to You!

Yesterday, was Cliopatria's 18 month anniversary and, shortly after 1:00 a.m. this morning, she had her 200,000th visitor. Actually, promiscuous thing that she is, we've had many more than that because History News Network's system doesn't allow our site meters to register visitors to particular posts, only to the blog itself. But, in any case, Cliopatria's passed two milestones in the last 24 hours.

When my personal blog at History News Network, Welcome to My World, was"transblogrified" into Cliopatria eighteen months ago, I gave this explanation of our name.

Our name, with its allusions, is found in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. As with much else in Finnegans Wake, however, I'm not sure what it is doing there. Our name vaguely recalls the memory of Cleopatra, her beauty, her mystery, and her contingent power. More directly, it invokes the name of Clio, one of the nine muses in Greek mythology. Clio the Proclaimer was the muse of history, who was credited with bringing the Phoenician alphabet to Greece. She is often depicted in western art with a scroll and a small library of books. In his work for the Spectator, Joseph Addison, who perfected the essay and pioneered the novel as English literary forms, used her name as a pseudonym. The Latinate"patria" would refer to one's place of origin, a father's home or a native land. We speak from and of history as our place of beginnings, in which we act, through which we move, and to which we owe some allegiance. As a word of both Greek and Latin roots, to say nothing of the Egyptian allusion,"Cliopatria" is also a barbaric hybrid. It suggests the plurality of our origins and degrees of alienation. We are not obliged to agree with, only to listen carefully and respectfully to, each other.

That's a statement of aspiration, as well as an explanation of our name. There have been moments when we've failed to live up to either of those things, but they remain as an originating ideal and as a goal toward which we move.

I am immensely grateful both to Cliopatria's founding members, Tim Burke, Oscar Chamberlain, Ken Heineman, KC Johnson, and Jon Dresner, who joined us in the first two weeks, as well as to all of those who have subsequently become Cliopatriarchs. Our credibility is utterly dependent on their abundant thoughtfulness and generosity. I am also grateful to our audience which has grown far beyond anything we might have originally imagined. It now comes from over 130 countries and dependencies. Sometimes, that list sends me to an atlas to find out where the Cocus and the Faroe islands, French Polynesia, and the Netherlands Antilles are. More often, it is a humbling reminder that the net's reach is, among other things, a measure of national wealth.

So, thank you all and happy milestones to Cliopatria. I'm hoping that she's maturing gracefully.