So I’m thinking of history-punk as a way to challenge who gets to do history, who history is about, and most important, who history is for.
Who am I? I’m Dan Allosso. I’m finishing up a PhD in American and environmental history. I also have some background in the business world, and in high tech. I’ve been thinking about the environment and rural history and regular people’s history for a while now. I’m writing a dissertation about family businesses in rural America in the 19th century. This site will contain my experiments with putting together a lot of that info, in a form that might be interesting and useful to others.
The material I put up here will be work-in-progress. I don’t believe in academic secrecy, and as far as copyright goes, I like Neil Gaiman’s approach. This historical data doesn’t actually belong to me as a researcher. My interpretations and insights will be my own, of course, but other people might have other interpretations. Or other uses for the data.
I’ve played around with a variety of blog formats over the last couple of years, and for my own sanity I’ve settled on two blogs: a general blog and a reading blog, both of which are over on my site danallosso.com. There are temporary archives of the stuff I’d originally put here, still on this site. But all the material is over there too, and all the new stuff will be going up over there. History-punk will be for experimental history.
