Welcome to Hugo Schwyzer ...

Adam Kotsko suggested in "There is Nothing Outside the Blog" that all things are constituted by the word. "Hugo Schwyzer ought to be a Cliopatriarch"."So let it be said; so let it be done." And so he is. The man does have credentials, you understand. He did his undergraduate work at UC, Berkeley, and his graduate work at UCLA in medieval history. His article,"Northern Bishops and the Anglo-Scottish War in the Reign of Edward II," appeared in Thirteenth Century England, VII, ed. Michael Prestwich, Richard Britnell, and Robin Frame (NY: Woodbridge and Rochester, 1999), 243-54. Since then, he has been teaching a range of courses in history and gender studies at Pasadena City College, where evaluations by his students are almost embarrassingly positive.

Schwyzer maintains his own blog, known oddly enough as Hugo Schwyzer. Said blogger also has enough peculiarities to be interesting. He admits to being"a progressive, consistent-life ethic Anabaptist Democrat (but with a sense of humor), ... an avid marathoner, aspiring ultra-runner, die-hard political junkie, and proud father of a small chinchilla." Moreover, Schwyzer has a soft spot in his heart for The Angry Clam, as my colleague, Tim Burke, appears to have a soft spot in his heart for Chun the Unavoidable. (If you are Michael Meo, resent the blogochatter, and need diametrical points of reference, go here.) Let it be said that I've yet to discover soft spots in the heads of either Tim Burke or Hugo Schwyzer. There's simply no accounting for taste. Hugo will be known as the Cliopatriarch of Los Angeles. Modestly, he says that he'd rather be known as"the little old Cliopatriarch from Pasadena," but we need a real metropolitan out there, so chalk it up to the responsibilities of power.