Well, I didn’t expect it to be a whole year since my last post, but that’s just how it has worked out. It’s been quite a year for me in my personal life, but I have been keeping up with researching my Virgin Soil, Widowed Land series of posts, and in fact that project is ballooning into something much bigger than a series of blog posts. One thing that’s becoming clear through that process, though, is that it is about time to wrap up this blog and move on to other platforms. WordPress has made various changes that make my current setup pretty obsolete and hard to use, and I don’t really have any interest in changing this blog to fit in better with current standards.
I am going to finish the series, which will consist of three or four more posts over the course of the next few months. Over that same period, I’ll be setting up a new website with a different format to organize and present all the fascinating information I’ve been learning about the history of epidemics, medicine, demography, etc. in the course of research for this series. I have a lot of ideas for what’s going to go on the new site and I think it’ll be pretty interesting for anyone interested in this blog. I’ll post the link here when it’s ready to go. The name and a lot of other details are still undetermined but will be worked out soon.
Later on, I think a book project is likely to be the ultimate result of all this research and thinking. There’s a lot there but it’s pretty buried in academic and other specialist, technical literature, and I think there’s a need for a popularized treatment of a lot of this history. Obviously epidemic disease is a hot topic these days, so there’s that, but really the importance of this story is much larger and as always, popular accounts lag behind the cutting-edge research.
It’s a bit of a melancholy experience to be winding down this blog, which has been such a big part of my life for so long, even though I think it does make sense. Today marks thirteen years that I’ve been at this, which is a pretty good run as these things go. Happy solstice.
Gambler's House 