A while ago I rather unceremoniously put my article on the Scottish Rite and the American South on this blog. I am happy that the article, which I don't think was given a terribly elegant launch by me here on this very basic blog, will be published by an important Masonic research publication in the near future, which has also published many significant scholars in the field of Masonic studies. That article, written before I was named Scholar of the Supreme Council here in DC, has gotten some good feedback. I can't help but feel that the reason is that I strove to reflect the most critical standards of general approach to matters dealing with the history of the American South. Every field of inquiry seems to have its own somewhat bespoke standards, reflecting matters mostly of emphasis, while of course existing in the realm of more general standards of critical honesty for scholarship.
While working generally in cultural history, I am not a specialist in the South per se. Even so I tried diligently to reason about the Scottish Rite's history within the framework of the approach currently accepted by experts in that field. I am proud of the result, and happy it will be given a classy publication more than my bare-bones blog here.
But in a way what has made me happiest is that since I wrote the article so much that I have rather serendipitously encountered while doing research has bolstered or confirmed some of the insights I put in that article. In fact just today I received the latest issue of the Bulletin of the German HIstorical Institute (Supplement 8 -- 2012) , which is located in DC, in my very neighborhood in fact. In fact I have attended many lectures at the Institute, and have been getting their lavishly produced Bulletin for almost 20 years I believe. I have always had an interest in German history, as my Grandfather Peter Paul Fuchs was on the 5-member Reparations Court as a Bundesrichter.
Yet, in fact this very interesting Bulletin of theirs has more than strictly German history, and I have read many interesting articles on a variety of topics through the years. Lo and behold, today I opened it up and there is a very apposite article which ties in beautifully with my research article I have been discussing, and which is on this blog in prep for the upcoming hard-copy publication.
To wit, a scholar named Sebastian Jobs who has received one of the GHI's prestigious postdoctoral fellowship describes his ongoing research in a way that dove-tails excellently with a point in my article. The name of his research is "Rumors of Revolt: Uncertain Knowledge of Slave Insurrection in the Antebellum South." Significantly and insightfully Jobs describes how his research is indicating the importance in the study of the Antebellum South for the phenomenon of fearful rumor of insurrection. This ties in well with the notion I described of Frederick Dalcho's very probable fear of being tagged as one of the "Illuminati" at this period who were, it might have been feared, promoting French Revolution style fighting. it also shows generally that reasoning from probabilities of these kind of "uncertain" phenomena, meet the standards of scholarship in this special field. I cite Larry Tise's indications of these fears as current at the period and ripe for rumor, and make deductions on the impetus for Dalcho's actions on that basis. I believe the fact that Sebastian Jobs, working on the cutting edge in this field is showing the scholarly importance of these types of rumor-information for cultural deduction in that period, is in itself a kind of broad confirmation of the general tack I took in that paper.
While working generally in cultural history, I am not a specialist in the South per se. Even so I tried diligently to reason about the Scottish Rite's history within the framework of the approach currently accepted by experts in that field. I am proud of the result, and happy it will be given a classy publication more than my bare-bones blog here.
But in a way what has made me happiest is that since I wrote the article so much that I have rather serendipitously encountered while doing research has bolstered or confirmed some of the insights I put in that article. In fact just today I received the latest issue of the Bulletin of the German HIstorical Institute (Supplement 8 -- 2012) , which is located in DC, in my very neighborhood in fact. In fact I have attended many lectures at the Institute, and have been getting their lavishly produced Bulletin for almost 20 years I believe. I have always had an interest in German history, as my Grandfather Peter Paul Fuchs was on the 5-member Reparations Court as a Bundesrichter.
Yet, in fact this very interesting Bulletin of theirs has more than strictly German history, and I have read many interesting articles on a variety of topics through the years. Lo and behold, today I opened it up and there is a very apposite article which ties in beautifully with my research article I have been discussing, and which is on this blog in prep for the upcoming hard-copy publication.
To wit, a scholar named Sebastian Jobs who has received one of the GHI's prestigious postdoctoral fellowship describes his ongoing research in a way that dove-tails excellently with a point in my article. The name of his research is "Rumors of Revolt: Uncertain Knowledge of Slave Insurrection in the Antebellum South." Significantly and insightfully Jobs describes how his research is indicating the importance in the study of the Antebellum South for the phenomenon of fearful rumor of insurrection. This ties in well with the notion I described of Frederick Dalcho's very probable fear of being tagged as one of the "Illuminati" at this period who were, it might have been feared, promoting French Revolution style fighting. it also shows generally that reasoning from probabilities of these kind of "uncertain" phenomena, meet the standards of scholarship in this special field. I cite Larry Tise's indications of these fears as current at the period and ripe for rumor, and make deductions on the impetus for Dalcho's actions on that basis. I believe the fact that Sebastian Jobs, working on the cutting edge in this field is showing the scholarly importance of these types of rumor-information for cultural deduction in that period, is in itself a kind of broad confirmation of the general tack I took in that paper.
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