Author: abbymullen
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Jeopardy! Postmortem, Part 2
Now that almost all my friends from Tape Day have gotten to see themselves on TV, I thought it might be worth a second blog post to reminisce about the experience of watching oneself on Jeopardy! (Sadly, two of our number haven’t seen themselves yet–the planned alternate and the rollover alternate. I’m so excited to…
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I Lost on Jeopardy!
And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. The Journey I’ve taken the Jeopardy! Anytime test almost every year for the past many years. Nothing ever came of it, nor did I expect anything to come of it. Purportedly, something like 100,000 people take the Anytime test every year, so…
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Teaching Writing in History Classes
This is the first post of what I hope will be many posts where I ruminate on the experience of teaching writing in history classes. I find myself thinking about this topic a lot, and I know that others also think about it a lot, and yet I find that the published scholarship on this…
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To Fix a National Character: The United States in the First Barbary War, 1800-1805
At long last, my first monograph is available for pre-order! You can buy it through Johns Hopkins UP (the publisher) or any number of other establishments that sell books. It’s a book about the First Barbary War, and how the United States tried to use its conflicts with the Barbary states to enter the Mediterranean…
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Government Shutdowns as Class Activity
On two occasions this semester, faculty at my institution had to grapple with the possibility that if the government shut down, all civilian faculty would be furloughed for an indeterminate amount of time, while our students continued to come to class. So we had to create contingency plans for our students to mitigate learning loss…
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The Many Vicissitudes of Wadsworth and Co.
This semester the Naval History and Heritage Command made a site visit to USNA. In conjunction with that visit, I gave a talk at the USNA Museum about one of my favorite characters in my research on the First Barbary War: Henry Wadsworth. This post is a lightly edited version of that talk. I intend…
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Where Do Circulars Go?
The circular is a staple of State Department communications in the nineteenth century–a document written with the intention of its being circulated to many different people in a region. (Spare a thought for the poor clerk who had to write out each copy of the circular!) Since multiple copies of circulars were created, they often…
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Farewell to Consolation Prize
This afternoon, we held a party at RRCHNM to celebrate the past of Consolation Prize and the future of R2 Studios. I wrote out a little speech which sums up a lot of how I feel about the show and what it has meant, so I thought I’d post it here. Thank you all for…