When was killing a journalist not considered murder?  This was the question that first sent me on a research odyssey exploring the origin of American journalism and how it impacts how we understand and interpret the media in present tense.  Each chapter examines an aspect of this relationship from the nineteenth century until the present, including the connections between the ritualized aggression of the nineteenth century and the feuding among blog journalists today.

Although my book chronicles the advent of honor rituals in the origin of American journalism, I am naturally curious on an interdisciplinary level about the historical context of the issues and items that impact our lives on a daily basis large and small.  This Weblog is a collection of those curiousities.  Sometimes the questions will be weighty…sometimes they won’t.  But hopefully entries will always be entertaining. 

- R