Fifteen years ago I was sitting in my room at the David Library of the American Revolution in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania and I wrote my first blog post at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. I had just published The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America and a publicist at the University of Pennsylvania Press suggested I should start a blog to help promote the book. Here was my original post:
Well, I have finally given in to my blogging impulse. For the past year I have been doing some occasional blogging over at Religion and American History, but I have never held forth on my own site before. I hope to use this blog to update you on what is happening with The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment. I hope to keep this blog focused on events, reviews, thoughts, and anything else related to the book. I am not sure how long this blogging experiment will last, but for those of you interested in the book I hope you find something useful here.
After a year of blogging I wrote:
I started this blog to promote my book, but the more I blogged the more I enjoyed doing it. I continue to use the blog to tell you more about The Way of Improvement Leads Home and Philip Vickers Fithian, but I have branched out to cover a host of topics related to American history, religion, politics, and academic life.
On a good day we can get up to 100 visits to the site, but nothing has compared to my “Does Sarah Palin Speak in Tongues” post which received 59 comments and over 3000 hits. My series on Sam Wineburg and historical thinking was very popular and my weekly “Sunday Night Odds and Ends” usually leads to a relatively high number of visitors on Monday mornings.
As we enter our second year, I am hoping for more visitors and more conversation in the comments section. I am still looking for photos for my “places” features so send in pics of the places that have meaning to you in your everyday lives. And if you have a blog, please feel free to add me to your blogroll.
Thanks to all of my faithful readers!! I know some of you have been with me since the beginning and continue to read. If there is anything you would like to see on this blog, or if you have any suggestions, do not hesitate to contact me.
I know some of you have now been with me here for fifteen years! You have survived multiple platforms and URLs. (Our first URL was www.philipvickersfithian.com) as well as our move to Current in April 2021. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your support of the work we have done here. When I started the blog I never thought I would keep this going for so long, but here we are, thousands and thousands of posts later, as senior citizens of the blogosphere.
Thanks to all of our readers and all of my students and interns–past and present–who have contributed to this blog.