The First Blog: Setting a Foundation

The Edge of the Village content is largely composed of anything and everything that deals with Great Plains History, Public History, and World History, three themes and topics that happen to be the graduate and professional focus of this blogger.

The intent of this blog is to bring information from academia (whatever that word means in all of its glory and horror) and the professional world closer to the non-professional.  Another intent is to listen to, report on, and analyze what others are saying, professional and non-professional, political and non-political alike.  Professions are loosely defined as the codification and standardization of subjects and disciplines, but by no means does this mean professionals are somehow smarter or more informed (one can defer to the story of Socrates and the oracle, or the chorus line in Operation Ivy’s “Knowledge”: All I know is that I don’t know nothing — this helps this blogger feel somehow connected to the EduPunk movement).

As well, politics are polemics are one-sided arguments that are effective at getting a dialog going.  The important component, though, is to remember that rhetorical polemics are intrinsic to chopping it up a bit to learn something new, or anew.  Nothing is ever settled.  It is only transitory, or another phase of modernity, a word Leszek Kolakowski defined as a sort of tension between existing structures and the evolution necessary for culture and society and individuals to breath in the grand present day push into the future.  Kolakowski said this in a collection of writings published under the title, Modernity on Endless Trial (University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Note: The Edge of the Village is a namesake built off a modified or remixed version of The Village Voice namesake.