Just about...

I passed 2500 published posts on this blog sometime in the last month. Imagine!

Passed a million page views...

Sometime in the last two or three days this blog passed 1,000,000 page views. And that's just since I changed the name and hosting arrangements about three (?) years ago! Huzzah!

Are you ready for the country?

...cause it's time to go!

I will not be blogging for the next two weeks, unless I post some more today.

Favorite posts, 2010

Just click here!

This blog's top 5 posts, according to Blogger stats

The legend of Saladin
Not quite Christmas, but wolves anyway
More from Kyrgyzstan
Memories of Catal Huyuk
Blue sunset?

They are all there not for my deathless prose, but for the pictures, none of which originate with me. (The wolves, alas, are no longer accessible, except by searching for the image via Google.)

Change of title

When I first started writing this blog in 2005, I was using it mainly to communicate with my undergraduate students in history. That year, as for most years before that, I was teaching what might be called "early history." (Ask the average academic historian if before 1800 counts as early history; the average academic historian teaches modern history and will certainly agree with that characterization.) Furthermore, I was just about the only person at Nipissing University teaching early history. So calling the blog "Early History" reflected both my interests and my teaching role pretty accurately.

A lot of things have changed since 2005. Nipissing University now has other early historians, doing a variety of "early" courses and doing them well. Second, my regular course on the history of Islamic civilization has become more and more important to me. Although a good half of the course concerns events before 1800, both I and my students tend to be very interested in connections between earlier Islam and defense of the 20th and 21st centuries. So this interest drags into the blog a lot of very recent material. Finally, I continue to have a world history/world history of democracy orientation when I think about both the long-term and the immediate present. I do restrain my temptation to comment when it comes to recent material -- believe it or not! -- but things that are truly important I put it without apology. Like the space stuff, or the torture stuff.

Thus if a new reader came to this blog without being able to see the title, he or she would probably not say "This is a blog about early history." That reader might see it as a blog about all kinds of history and its connections to current events.

So I see it. This is pretty much a blog about one historian's view of world history, one I hope will be useful to all sorts of people, including my students in Islamic history and my medieval fourth-year seminar this fall.

Image: another tedious imperialist (Cecil Rhodes) bestrides the world, or at least Africa; on the other hand, that Cape to Cairo telegraph line, that's cool.

Half a million visits

Today this blog passed the half-a-million visits mark.

Favorite posts, 2009

Will McLean, who has more good ideas than most people I know, has just inspired me to select my favorites among my own posts of 2009. Just click here.

Image: a British gold quarter-sovereign from 2009.

Blogging history

Jeffrey J. Cohen, over at the blog In the Middle, is running a series of "blogging histories" by medievalists. This could serve as an introduction to blogs you haven't run across yet. Blog history #1 (Cohen's view of early days) is here; mine, #8, is here.