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March 19, 2025
Modern Still-Life: Echoes of the Digital Age
Lane Wallace is a dedicated high school teacher with a background in psychology, law, and history, bringing real-world insights into his College & Career Readiness and Intro to Law classes. With experience teaching subjects ranging from World and U.S. History to Drama, he emphasizes practical applications to equip students with essential life skills.
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March 18, 2025
Tips and Tricks for Archival Studies
This post reflects on the author’s experience conducting research in Scottish archives, describing the surreal joy of working with centuries-old documents. It offers advice for graduate researchers, emphasizing the importance of taking breaks, recognizing when to shift focus and accepting the challenges of finding original sources.
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March 12, 2025
Researching, Refocusing, and Developing a Topic
John Cardoza is a retired attorney and 2023 online MA graduate. After an initial, unfinished foray into graduate history at UCSB in the late 1970s, he attended law school at UC Davis and was employed in Ventura County as a prosecutor and family law attorney.
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February 27, 2025
The Cultural Power of Barbecue among Enslaved Americans
Brigitte Brown completed the history MA capstone in the summer of 2024. Her defense video examines barbecue culture among slaves in the Antebellum southern United States. Drawing from a rich collection of oral histories, she explores how barbecue functioned as an important meal created by and for black enslaved Africans.
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February 21, 2025
Archival Research and the Importance of Physical Documents
This post by Glenn Summers delivers a tactile and analytical discussion of some sources on the 1913 strike at Leith Docks, a key event during the UK’s Great Labour Unrest. These sources were discovered during the Scotland Archives Experience in June 2024.
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June 23, 2022
JOTPY Has Diverse Oral Histories For Pandemic Research
Blog post by Jason Inskeep
During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a constant stream of information barraged humans with alarming news, death statistics, and polarizing political stances. A wide variety of social media, forums, and video conferencing programs provided people an outlet.
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November 4, 2021
Fear: The Human Experience that Binds Us
Blog post by Pamela Zupo
Whether it is called the plague, the Black Death, or the Coronavirus, widespread disease has a way of generating fear and outright terror among those living within its invisible presence. Epidemics, such as the pestilence that afflicted the Iberian Peninsula of Spain during the late sixteenth century still resonate with historical truths that can be felt five hundred years later.
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October 21, 2021
Pharmacy in the Middle Ages
Blog post by Keisha Gordon
The past can indicate future events. Pandemics such as the COVID-19 may be new to us but they are not new to the historical record. The 1918 Flu, or the Black Death of the Middle Ages, are familiar to some.
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September 29, 2021
Uncertainty and Fear as a Universal Conditions
The Great Castilian Plague of 1596-1601 and the Covid-19 Pandemic of today
By Sarah Peterson
Not much has changed in human history between the Castilian Plague of 1596-1601 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-now. Sure, we understand science and data more than our ancestors, but common themes abound between our shared experience today and the lives of those caught-up in the late sixteenth-century Castilian pestilence.
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September 15, 2021
Tasting History: Analysis of a 16th Century Spanish Recipe
Blog post by Ellie Cormack
In the midst of the incessant COVID-19 pandemic, I offer you a brief diversion to a wildly popular phenomenon on the internet today: food blogs! But this is no ordinary food blog about gourmet mac and cheese or my best chocolate chip cookie recipe.