Hi folks,
This morning I flew to Las Vegas to attend the annual Western Historical Association (WHA) conference at the Westgate. The WHA is your typical academic conference: there are dozens of interesting panels, a huge book exhibition, enormous quantities of burnt coffee and tiny danishes, and everyone from prestigious scholars to first-year graduate students can be found milling about the place. But the difference, of course, is that we study Western history . . . probably the least stodgy historical field of them all (with the possible exception of Medievalists, who are pretty wild and crazy . . . in a good way, of course!). We have professors, students, ranchers and cowboys, American Indian historians, US-Mexican borderlands scholars, environmental history folks, lots of pubic and government historians, and this year we have a couple of panels on the relationship between the West and space exploration. It’s going to be an exciting weekend! ðŸ¤
I am on a committee and have some business to attend to this afternoon, but if anyone plans on being at the conference tomorrow I will be participating in a panel conversation about the recently published book Interior Borderlands, for which I contributed a chapter. It is at 8:30 am on Friday morning. And if enough people laugh at my jokes I may post my remarks online later.
Since I will be busy at the conference this weekend there will be no book review tomorrow. However, next Friday I will post a review of Clint Johnson’s Tin Cans and Greyhounds: The Destroyers That Won Two World Wars (thanks to Jackie Smith for the suggestion!). For Monday, I will recap the conference and make an argument for why every self-described “history nerd” should take the opportunity someday to go to a history conference, and on Wednesday I will post a narrative about Elmer’s experiences in June 1940.
By the way, I want to say hello and thank you to everyone who has followed the blog this week, and special thanks to my mom and my cousin Celia for banging the drum! This site’s page view counter is already in the tens of thousands, and I would love to get to 100 followers by Thanksgiving.
Last but not least, thank you to the reader who bought me a Ko-Fi this last week . . . let me know if you would like a shout-out on the blog. And the same goes for anyone in the future who contributes to my Ko-Fi fund . . . I don’t want to out any donors on here without their permission, but I am also more than happy to give them public props.
OK, thanks for reading. Time to go rustle up some grub . . .
– Matt
