Guten Tag

As a undergraduate student and a blogger, I'm always searching for another big project, particularly if that project poses a challenge.  For about 3 years, I've been writing a blog about politics, called Politics Not as Usual.  My major in college is history and, for a while, I have wanted to find a way to combine my academic interests with my blogging endeavors.

For the summer of 2012, I will be working on a project about late 19th and early 20th Century Volga-German immigration to the Midwest as part of Roanoke College's Summer Scholars Program.  The culmination of this process will be a substantial research paper, which I'll post here.  As of now, the project is focusing on the building of a small community in Kansas called Catherine.  Originally, the project was meant to be a microhistory (like a case study for history), but the resources to pursue that track quickly faded as a option.  Instead, the project is focusing on two areas.  First, a critique of the sources, which are large amounts of local histories with little primary source documents for historians to check the claims made.  The second part uses interviews to find out when these small communities started to break apart and lose relevance as ethnic communities and just become small farming communities.

So, what is the purpose of this blog?  My main purpose is to talk about my research process and discuss some insights about the academic research.  Let me be clear, this is not a day-by-day research journal blog.  There are hundreds of those out there and many, sorry for the insult here, are pointless.  Instead, my mission is to present a research finding and provide an insight about that finding.

This blog is, above all, an experiment to connect my very short experiences and lessons learned in academic history using this project as a vehicle.  I am not an expert in this area, my normal area is U.S. political and diplomatic history.  This project has connections with my family and is important to me.  I plan to post daily, since this experience is only two months long.  In the end, I hope my insights are helpful and that either something is learned by the audience about Volga-Germans or historical methodology.