100 Miles by April 1st - I’m at 86.5 miles with 20 days to go.
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Back to the blogroll and the outer circle of the Berkshire blogs. I found Karen Christensen’s Berkshire Blog last fall when I was putting together a website for a conference that went along with “African American Heritage in the Upper Housatonic Valley”. That text was published by Christensen’s Berkshire Publishing Company.

As a historian, I’m always wary of the potential for ghetoization when we start to look at one distinct American experience. Frances Jones-Sneed, a History Professor at MCLA, proposed that by looking at those distinct American experiences in relation to “the local” one could build a curriculum that exposed students to African American narratives in their own back yards. The Shaping Role of Place Curriculum project is a collection of curricula by local k-12 school teachers based on Jones-Sneed’s seminal thesis.

I bookmarked the Berkshire Publishing Company’s site and included it in the website I was building, but it was months before I had a moment to go back and dig around. Berkshire Publishing Company specializes in reference books, and Christensen’s blog is a refreshingly readable and intellectual, and her social media savvy is apparent. I’ve never met Karen, as she travels in the South County circles, but when our paths do cross, I promise to report tales of me being totally tongue tied and awestruck.

Tangentially related by both geography and history is GreenmanTim, who writes at Walking The Berkshires. GreenmanTim is an avid student of the Civil War and often blogs about his own genealogy projects, in addition to random tidbits of South County life.

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I am hiding at my parent’s house on Cape Cod for the week. Tomorrow, I will retreat to their in-law apartment, unpack my milk crate full of books on 1960s social protest movements and try to flesh out a few elements of my book. This time, I’m particularly interested in the Berkley Free Speech Movement, Columbia University’s Student Strike, COINTELPRO and The FBI, Drug Use and Life in the Closet. Watch this space for any ideas I may need help working through.