About Xferen

The Blog

I've wanted to start a blog for a long time, mostly as a place to think out loud about issues that matter to me: the quality of public life in the United States, how history can shed light on contemporary events, what it's like to be a working adult nowadays, and those rare aspects of existence that make everything else tolerable.

A note on this blog's name: "Xpoferen" is how Christopher Columbus signed his first name, at least for a while. I've always liked the way the word looks (especially because my given name is so freaking long), and it seemed like this was a good place to use it.


The Blogger

It's probably worth saying a bit about myself, too. I'm 31, a husband to Shannon and a father to Julia (who's just shy of 12 weeks old as I write this entry). I live in southeast Minneapolis. I work full-time at Capella University in Minneapolis, but I also try to squeeze in some time to do history, so as not to waste that very hard-won doctorate in US history from Northwestern University.

More than anything else, really, I'm an interested observer and participant in modern American life, and I'm eager to use this blog to share my views on that life. I think, above all, that we're living in a time that's not only bizarre and (like all other times) unprecedented in many ways, but that will - fifty or a hundred years into the future - seem like a critical transformative moment. A "watershed," to a historian or a hydrogeologist.

Overall, I would sum up my perspective by asserting that
a) even though everything's screwed up,
b) it's always been so, and
c) it seems likely to always be so...
d) it is nonethelss well worth nonetheless trying to understand it all by fitting our own contemporary situation into the longer span of history.