Commonplacing – Blog category that recalls people’s efforts in the past to record quotations from their reading for further rumination. They set down the words they found in commonplace books.

Conscription – The process of forcing men and sometimes women to enlist in the armed forces of their country. In the United States, we called it the draft.

Consumption – Our behavior as consumers. Used as a blog category here, it can include developments in business that shape consumer society. I was formally introduced to the history of consumption as editor of the Worlds of Consumption series.

Fascism – I started to include a lot of posts from our current political moment in this category, if they seemed relevant, but I’ve started to pare that back in favor of “authoritarianism” as a broader category, where possible. When I use “fascism,” I tend to have Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco in mind. I don’t worry about a specific definition for fascism as a blog category because it is a moving, changing topic that manifests differently over time and place. This is not to say it can’t be defined or described. Rather, I prefer to use categories in an open-ended way for the purposes of discovery.

Franco-Prussian War – Fought in 1870–71, this was the war in which Germany was forged into a nation state. It also saw atrocities that prefigured those in the World Wars in varying degrees. See my related portfolio page.

Human Rights – These are the rights that follow from all people having been created equal, whether or not all jurisdictions recognize these rights. I file a variety of posts under this category, including those that deal with human rights violations.

Imperial Germany – Also known aa the Kaiserreich, this is the version of Germany that existed from 1871 to 1918, when it had an emperor or Kaiser. It was created in the Franco-Prussian War, and it collapsed as a consequence of its defeat in World War I and the revolution that accompanied this loss.

Information Disorder – Information disorder is an umbrella term that describes the effects and interactions of human, algorithmic, and AI-produced disinformation, misinformation, and malformation. Propaganda can be part of this, although I’ve also retained it as a separate category in order to be able to describe the explicit public messaging of governments in wars and revolutions, especially in the past, before the days of sophisticated information warfare.

Knowledge History – I use this less common variation of “history of knowledge” for ease of use in the blog’s list of categories. Knowledge is a product of human practices and interactions. As such, it has a history. My encounter with this subject began as an editor at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, where I cofounded two scholarly blogs on the subject.

LLMs – Stands for “large language models,” which is what so-called AI is currently based on.

Past & Present – I file three sometimes overlapping types of posts under this blog category: (1) cases of the present seemingly rhyming with the past; (2) historical memory, that is, how people remember the past; and (3) situations in which some people in the present work to reshape the past for ulterior purposes, that is, cases of history’s use and abuse.

Shared Notes – This is a post format and blog category that I started in June 2024. I use it for notes written primarily for myself, but which are perhaps of interest to others. These posts do not respect the usual reader-centered conventions. I sometimes write reading notes the same way.

War & Society – Wars are fought in multifaceted contexts that include material factors, knowledge, culture, social relations, domestic politics, military institutions, and much more. The phrase “war and society” emphasizes these interrelations, including in peacetime. The materials I gather under this blog category are correspondingly wide-ranging.

Wilhelm Groener (1867–1939) – I centered my dissertation on this man, using his biography to explore officering and war planning in Imperial Germany.

Last updated: March 11 2025