One down, 2 to go...

I officially finished my paper for HST 524. It is a riveting look at the effect (little to none, in fact the perception of war seems to have had more effect on photography than vice versa) photography had on the perception of war during the American Civil War. It was long and boring to write and I'm glad I'm almost finished with this class. I'm kind of sick of learning about the Civil War.

Now I must go to bed. I'm going to be dead tired tomorrow.

Sometimes when I'm writing...

... I feel like I'm completely full of shit and rewriting history how I see it. Who am I to say what happened almost 500 years ago? I really wish I had a time machine. That would be so cool.

...the historian in me, she can't resist...

"If we are to accept, as Doyle here invites us to do, that the shape of the revolution was determined by accidents, then we are to accept not simply that the outcome was fundamentally random but also that the event is its own explanation. That runs the risk of becoming eventually an argument akin to 'what happens, happens because it happens.'" -Colin Lucas

Now see... no matter how right a philosophy of "what happens, happens" may be, a historian can never put forth that argument for the simple fact that if we did, we would be out of a job. hehehehe...

I'm a historian, so what?"

"The historian's god is chance. Cleopatra's nose, the Duchess of Marlborough's gloves, the Holy Roman Emperor's mushrooms, Hitler sending a dispatch a day later than he should have sent it - these are the true stuff of history. And the task of the historian is to accumulate more and more of such facts and put them in chronological order. His not to reason why; indeed, he must not reason at all. His world is an academic Garden of Eden, a nudist's paradise of naked facts, in which he may sport, inocent not only of the idea's of good and evil [...], but innocent of any ideas at all."

Alfred Cobban
The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution