History, One Post at a Time

Think our ancestors didn’t blog? Think again. Although the term blogging and our electronic way of doing it are relatively new, the idea of disseminating information via informal writing is certainly not.

As part of NC State’s History Weekend, the history department is sponsoring a free lecture on Saturday by Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, on the history of blogging.

Darnton, whose early research focused on ephemera, will share how the bits and pieces of written material from years past were our ancestors’ ways of blogging. Darnton will take audience members back to 18th century blogging in France and lead them through blogging history up to our present time.

Jonathan Ocko, head of NC State’s history department, explains that Darnton’s work shows that “anything someone wrote down can hold historical information. All the bits and pieces contain opinion and commentary.”

You may think that historians wouldn’t be interested in something as seemingly modern as blogging, but that’s not true. “We [historians] are connoisseurs of change,” says Ocko. “We’re interested in anything that involves change and we study the causation of that change.”

Historians frequently use blogs in their own work, says Ocko, who finds them useful in his own work on Chinese history. “When looking at blogs and their historical counterparts, it’s interesting to find the democratization of expression.”

And blogs are not only important to current work. “When future historians study our time, they will be looking at blogs,” says Ocko.

Ocko is excited to be bringing historians such as Darnton to campus, emphasizing that all are welcome to attend the free lecture and other History Weekend events, which begin Friday night with the classic movie “Desk Set,” starring Spencer Tracy and Kathering Hepburn.

“This event is not just for scholars,” he says. “The aim of History Weekend is to bring distinguished historians to share their work in a way that is interesting and accessible to the general reading public. We pick themes that appeal to broad audiences and give a sense of why history matters.”