I was 25 years old when I started writing the blog version of Res Obscura, which ran from 2010 to 2023 (and still exists here). This was the early summer of 2010. I was a second-year PhD student in history, living with two roommates in a 1920s bungalow on the east side of Austin.
And I was very dedicated to the idea that you should aim to write a new blog post every day:
The first few posts of Res Obscura, all written in an apparently rather frantic week in June of 2010.
This is a concept that the 40-year-old version of me, with two young kids and zero free time, cannot even begin to fathom.
It’s also a practice of the old internet that simply doesn’t exist anymore — one of many digital behaviors that was swallowed up by social media. That whole world of blogging (exploratory, low-stakes, conversational, and assuming a readership of people who had bookmarked your URL and who read it on a desktop or laptop computer) is almost entirely gone now.
My first two years writing Res Obscura in its blog format were great fun. I began to develop an intellectual community, forming contacts with, for instance, the wonderful Public Domain Review (founded 2011 and still going strong). I linked to and was linked to by a range of other history bloggers who I saw as kindred spirits, some of whom seem to have disappeared (BibliOdyssey) others of whom have become well-known writers (Lindsey Fitzharris).
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It was pretty addictive when a post went viral. In those halcyon days when written blog posts about obscure historical subjects were viable sources of viral content, you could end up getting covered in international media for, say, discovering a cat’s paw prints on a 15th century Croatian manuscript.
Readership analytics for the pre-Substack Res Obscura, 2010-present.
That spike in readership around 2018 was partially from a post about 17th century food that, unexpectedly, led to me speaking about snail water on New Zealand public radio.
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