Why did I start a Substack?
Here's my story, what I hope to do here, and why you might be interested.
A decade ago, in 2011—about the time I was shopping around the manuscript of a little novel called Zombies of Byzantium—I started a blog. It was “Proudly Powered by WordPress.” I bought my own domain name (www.seanmunger.com) and hoped, as many people did at the time, to draw a little attention to myself as a freelance writer. I was also in graduate school, working on my M.A. in history. This was two or so years after the legal profession and the economy chewed me up and spit me out onto the pavement in the paroxysm, now already curiously obscure, called the Great Recession. Remember that? It was “the Biggest Economic Collapse Since The Great Depression.®™” Life was considerably different then.
Fast-forward ten years. The United States and the world are teetering on the brink of a rebirth of fascism we have not seen since the 1930s. Climate change has gotten much, much, much worse. There are no academic jobs; there are vanishingly few jobs of any kind. The mere teaching of honest history is rapidly being outlawed. What I’ve done in the past ten years—got my Ph.D., written some books, taught a lot of courses, converted religions, tried to find myself—isn’t that important in the scheme of things. But history marches on, as it always has and always will. I don’t know that I have a place in it. But I am trained to observe it in a way most people aren’t, and I’ve always enjoyed doing so.
At its height around 2016 my “Proudly Powered by WordPress” blog was a major part of my life. I had millions of page views and over 1000 subscribers, and there were 2,158 articles posted there, a few of which were actually good. Then my blog suffered two extinction-level events. The first was when I migrated from WordPress dot com to WordPress dot org, which was, in 2018, what I was told big-boy writers did when they got tired of the decaying infrastructure that the free, circa 2011 style WordPress dot com platform offered. “Blogging,” as it was known then, was dead anyway. In the migration I found out too late I couldn’t take my hundreds of subscribers with me. Essentially I lost my audience on that day.
In July 2020, in the height of the coronavirus pandemic, I made a choice to migrate my site www.seanmunger.com to a commercial platform where I could use it as a base to offer online history courses. My “blog” (which does still exist, over there) became somewhat incidental. That extinguished the few hardy survivors of my audience. The image at the top of this page is the header image from my very last blog post published on the WordPress site, on July 10, 2020. Almost no one read it. I had already lost touch with most of my audience. They weren’t with me, nor I with them, during the worst of what we’ve endured as a society since then, from that tumultuous election to the assault on American democracy at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the climate-change-fueled fires and heat waves, and now, the new clutch of the Delta-variant coronavirus pandemic. I was even more, as I probably was always fated to be, an obscure historian sharing the past with a few Twitter followers and some YouTube viewers, and my in-person students (whom I love). But the world passed me by.
I don’t know if this platform, this Substack—a 2021 incarnation, I suspect, of the charmingly quaint “Proudly Powered By” infrastructure of a decade ago—will give me back my voice. Probably it won’t. I’ve been quite cynical the past three years, but I’m finally willing to try. If you’d like to be along for the journey, for whatever does transpire here, I’d love to have you with me.
What You Can Expect Here
This project has two objectives. One is to serve as the place where I can, as I once did, write and think about the (mostly historical) subjects that have always interested me, and occasionally bring a historical perspective to bear on current events or conditions. Another, much more daunting and long-term objective is to, if it can be done, recreate the back catalog of my old 2011-2018 blog, or at least its highlights. (Remember, for example, “Stockfish Empire?” It’s here now). There’s no way I can recreate all 2,158 articles, but I hope to post enough of them to make a difference—and, as no one has read them in three years, they will likely be new to most readers.
So, you can expect some interesting history. I have a “greatest hits” list and I hope to go down it item by item, things I was proud of back in the day. Like dusty museum pieces it might be nice to buff them up and put them on the shelf again. The subscription section—once it’s up and running—will offer my new and contemporary thoughts from time to time on current events or works in progress, stuff that’s not old and cold but perhaps new and fresh, if I still have it in me. If my historical perspective is capable of helping anyone make sense of our current world, you’re welcome to get all the benefit you can from it.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I hope you do sign up for the email list and stick with me now and again. The past is not dead. It lives everywhere among and around us. It lives in an old book a family member gave you, an old photograph of someone you don't recognize, a memory that you can't quite shake. The past shapes our present and informs our future. Knowing history is like being handed a pair of magic glasses: you suddenly see the world in a whole new way.
☕ If you enjoy what I do, buy me a virtual coffee from time-to-time to support my work. I know it seems small, but it truly helps.
🎓 Like learning? Find out what courses I’m currently offering at my website.
📽 More the visual type? Here is my YouTube channel with tons of free history videos.
💌 Feedback to share or want to say hello? Hit reply on this email or leave me a comment on Substack.
I know this seems weird because I believe you are right, that blogging as we knew it really IS dead, but I still get a lot of hits. Not as many as I did when I published more, but a lot more than I should. Maybe I'm just a bad habit some people can't break.
I have such a dour outlook on the world and where we are going, or, more to the point, NOT going. I don't think we are going to do anything about climate change and in fifty years, this planet will be even more tragic than it already is. Which is pretty damned tragic.
I am very glad to hear from you and if you manage to get into my email, I will happily read you. I don't read many blogs anymore. I can't deal with all the fluff and Garry's head implodes whenever he reads that people are proud they don't watch or read the news -- or for that matter, read anything at all. He's 79 and having his head implode is potentially dangerous. I'd like to keep him around for a while.
All my academic friends have retired -- or never gotten work at all. Everyone thinks history is meaningless, think we are making too much out of climate change (but they probably don't live where their world in on fire or they are six feet under with the water rising). Or watch birds and realize that we've lost A BILLION OF THEM in the past 10 years with millions more disappearing every day.
I do not write about this much anymore. I've said it all before. Periodically, I post something, but I understand that the only people who read it are already singing with the choir.
Be well and BE IN TOUCH.
I'm not sure blogging was dead then. I had a surge in numbers through 2020 and early 2021. Now things are dragging again. Was just thinking today "How much longer can I keep going?"