Archive.org !!!! Treasure trove of old texts to borrow!

I know I've landed on archive.org's site before, on occasion google has lead me there for a text of an old book/document on there.. but for some reason it's never been a source I regularly check/use.

WHY, THOUGH?

Today for the first time I was lead there to a page that would let me borrow an old, niche-as-heck book that my local libraries don't have and that I was about to have to buy off of AbeBooks.com.

After a couple clicks, LOOK WHAT I FOUND!

These are all borrowable books!

Books I don't have to buy!

Many books I didn't even know existed!

I was so excited! So overwhelmed!

I decided to make some new collections on Wakelet.com to keep track of the stuff I want to read. I made Utopian People, Utopia (General), and Community Biographies.

Hoepfully this will help me from getting too overwhelmed! I'm super excited for all these new books and just wanted to make this post real quick to make note of this exciting new discovery, which probably everyone else already knows about!

Research Methods Virtual Open House @ SAGE Research Methods

SAGE Research Method's "Virtual Open House" is going on now. Free access to a TON of online research methodology articles, chapters, ebooks, etc. I've just lost several hours of my day to collecting some really great resources over there!

Free access runs until March 18.

Learm more: Research Methods Virtual Open House: Doors are Open!

Tribalism & Communication articles

Other than the books listed in the post below, I'm going to use this post to collect the articles I find on the subject of Tribalism & Communication.

• Research says there are ways to reduce racial bias. Calling people racist isn’t one of them. (Vox)
• White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo [PDF]
• Why Can't Liberals Talk to Conservatives? or What's really the Matter with Kansas? by Robert D Feinman
• Moral Politics How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff
• Conservatives vs. liberals: Debating a liberal is maddening: They think conservatives are evil, while we think they're silly. By Charlotte Allen
• How to Talk Like a Conservative (If You Must): The left's linguistics guru says liberals have to watch their language. By Dave Gilson 
• Psychologists Are Learning How to Convince Conservatives to Take Climate Change Seriously By Jesse Singal
• The Secret to Making Conservatives Care About Climate Change (Take Part)
• 
  

Election Day Podcasts!

I'm a New Books Network podcast junkie, and I was attempting to link to some relevant-to-election-day author interviews over on FB, but there were just far too many.! So, movin' it over to blog format. This is just a quick list I have made on my lunch break, looking through the first 20 pages of the New Books in Political Science page, so this is certainly not any sort of comprehensive list!

Hillary & Drumpf

• The Rise of Trump: America's Authoritarian Spring
• Hillary Rising: The Politics, Persona, and Policies of a New American Dynasty
• Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal
• Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls are Born to Lead

Gender & Race

• The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women's Quest for the American Presidency
• Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal
• Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior
• Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency
• Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965
• Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority
• From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

Parties & the Party System

• Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America
• Right Moves: The Conservative American Think Tank in Political Culture since 1945
• The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How they Weaken Democracy
• Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign
• Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction
• Too Dumb Too Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections
• Why Washington Won't Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis

Money & Politics

• Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy
• Fed Power: How Finance Wins
• Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections
• Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy
• Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States
• Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail

More:

• Deciding What's True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism
• The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy
• The Deregulatory Moment?: A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws
• 150 Years of ObamaCare
• Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration
• The Democracy Promotion Paradox
• Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World
• Political Advertising in the United States
• American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction
• Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World
• Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics

Seven reasons why blogging can make you a better academic writer (pat thomson - THE)

Saw this post over on #AcWriMo today, and I feel like it justifies my focus on blogging on academic topics (none are posted yet, still working on them!) this November. I know I'm not ready to write anything formal yet, but I know that making a habit of consistently writing and blogging will help immensely. Especially with brevity and clarity! And, you know, actually sitting down and doing the writing itself. All things I very much need to work on!

Seven reasons why blogging can make you a better academic writer (pat thomson - Times Higher Education)

My first #AcWriMo!

#AcWriMo starts tomorrow! I am participating, though I don't think I will be truly writing academically. I'm not quite there yet in my #homegradschooling, though I'm pretty close.

So, I think this November will be, for me, about writing my academic subject/interest(s), but aimed at this here blog, as well as a bit for my Unitarian Universalist church's newsletter (I just joined the archives team & volunteered to start a 'column' on UU history.)

I've been out of school for 3 years now, and my writing is extremely rusty (and by that I mean it sucks), not to mention that I have no habit of writing or time built into my schedule for it anymore, so I'm hoping this will help me really gear up and grease the mental wheels before I attempt to dive in to journal article writing (and hopefully I'll be able to turn some of my blog writings into a more formal piece of writing down the road.)

Here are just a few of the articles I have been reading to prepare myself:

literature review step one, scoping. #acwrimo work in progress (patter)
not all literature ‘reviews’ are the same (patter)
doing the literature review – thinking about patterns and groups (patter)
mapping your literatures (patter)
dealing with the space between literatures (patter)
literature know-how – beware too much naming, not enough framing (patter)
History Resources (University of Mary Washington)
Thesis Whisperer's Top Tips

I'm going to be coming into work about an hour early to take advantage of the nicer computer & the fact that I can't do anything while sitting at home (and I have no laptop!), and possibly stay a bit later, we'll see. Good luck to everyone else who is participating in any of the WriMos!

Learning to Do History outside of Academia

Since I'm currently on my own with my studies, I haven't had any senior historians taking me under their wings and teaching me how to actually.. you know... do history. I feel that lack of guidance acutely at times.

 I've been at all this for some months, though, and I've managed to find a few resources that have been a significant help in how to conceptualize the work of a historian, as well as learning how actual research and actual writing is done. These aren't the only History podcasts I listen to, but they are the ones that either explicitly talk about how Historians do/should think & how actual research and writing is done (like the first few), or ones that talk to authors of historical books and are particularly helpful to hear how other researchers actually work.

Podcasts:
The Way of Improvement Leads Home
Doing History Series on Ben Franklin's World
Practicing History
The Art of the Review
Ben Franklin's World
New Books in Biography
New Books in History

  Academia-oriented blogs:
(Not history-specific, but have also been quite helpful)
Thesis Whisperer
The Research Whisperer
PhD Talk
Get A Life, PhD
ProfHacker
Tenure, She Wrote
The Professor Is In
Inside Higher Ed

I've also been finding other historians to add on Twitter and Academia.edu on the social media side of things. It's hard to bee too active on Twitter currently, as I spend all day at my day job (no twittering there!) and then at home I rarely get on a computer. I need to figure out a good plan for that. And of course, Academia.edu is a bit sad when you don't actually have any papers of your own to list! But, hopefully I will someday!