Introduction

Hello friends, family, faculty and strange web surfers. Welcome to my blog.

I want to use this site to let you follow me on my trip through Germany. This fall I plan to visit Berlin and then move on to Magdeburg, Erfurt and Nuremberg. So I want to use this blog for several purposes. For one thing, I just want to keep everyone up to date on my travels. I will have plenty of time to myself. I will muse as I wander, post on what I see in each town and give you my take from current events in Germany, especially those things relating to discussions on terror, security, freedom and democracy. For another, I want to float parts of my writing on fear and politics in Central Germany. I want to generate posts and discussions on theory, methodology, archival findings, historiography and arguments related to my work. As an offshoot of this, I want to suggest that some of us start a forum that leads up to the graduate student conference this fall in the Penn State Department of History and Religious Studies on the theme of "voices of violence". And who knows what else - this may be a place for our department's dissertation group to build a forum as well. So with these goals in mind, I am ready to jump the pond and get started. I look forward to hearing from you and hope that you check in from time to time. Mach's gut!