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28Apr/090

Wyoming Territorial Prison Museum Website

For the past couple of weeks in between final projects for the university, I've been working on the website for the Wyoming Territorial Prison Museum. Originally I was going to do an internship there, but because that fell through due to timing issues, I was just commissioned instead to do the website.

Wyoming Territorial Prison in the late 1890s

My goal was to somewhat mimic the design of this blog, but of course with its own look and feel. I think I've successfully accomplished that. Now that the site is up and full operational, I am going to be translating the site into German by request of the museum curator. I've already started the process, but I haven't finished that part yet.

The English version is complete, however, and I recommend you take a look at it here: http://www.wyomingterritorialpark.com.

Tagged as: Territorial Prison, Wyoming No Comments

10Apr/092

Blog Consolidation – Update

After some consideration and the shutting down of a couple of my other blogs, I think I am just going to continue with my blogs as such. I have reduced the number to three (this one, Es Wird Kalt and Und Es Regnet) and I think that will suffice. That is much better than the seven which I had before.

My decision lies in the fact that most of the readers of History Rhymes read this blog for history and not for anything else. So I've decided to keep it separate and write only about history here. Everything else will be on Und Es Regnet.

Now it's time to get back to some history.

Tagged as: My Blogs 2 Comments

9Apr/092

Blog Consolidation

I am thinking about consolidating all of my blogs into just two: an English language blog and a German language blog. I am kind of tired of having several different blogs which I feel I need to update and which often times have the same subject matter anyway. The separation between English and German I still feel is valid for obvious reasons, but other than that I don't think I really need seven different blogs.

If I were to do that (and I am still in the internal debating process of it), I would turn History Rhymes into my English language blog. The subject matter wouldn't change a whole lot, but there would possibly be a few posts about other, non-history related subjects such as technology, German or my music. My only problem is I am afraid I would alienate readers who do not care for such topics and only want to read about history. Of course the subject matter would primarily be about history.

What do you, the readers, think about the idea? I am, after all, keeping this blog for my readers. I would really like your input on it.

Tagged as: My Blogs 2 Comments

26Mar/090

Historiography Paper on Reinhard Gehlen Sources

The professor of the history class I am currently taking, in which I am doing research on Reinhard Gehlen, has assigned a historiography paper with a minimum of 20 secondary sources. This would not be a problem if that many secondary sources existed on Reinhard Gehlen. I have been able to only find about 12 books and articles about him and his intelligence-gathering organization. Everything else I have found has been primary.

I would say the biggest reason for this is because the CIA has only recently (within the past 5-6 years) declassified and released material about Reinhard Gehlen and the Gehlen Organization during the Cold War. That isn't sufficient time for 20 books to be written on the subject, which means I have stumbled into relatively untreaded ground. Most of the books and articles I have found were actually written in the early 1970s shortly after Gehlen retired as president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (the Federal Intelligence Agency which his organization essentially turned into after its adoption by the West German government).

I certainly can't complain about the abundance of primary sources that I have found and seem to still be unwritten about, but it still does not help my situation with my historiography paper.

Tagged as: Historiography, Reinhard Gehlen No Comments

25Mar/090

A Sad Reality about American Universities

This is an article that shows the incredibly sad reality about grade inflation in American universities and its consequences. It is definitely worth a read.

Grade Inflation in American Universities

Tagged as: Univerisities No Comments

20Mar/090

Cataloging with LibraryThing

So now that I have access again to my entire personal library, I have begun to catalog all of my books with LibraryThing. It is taking a while because I have quite a large number of books. Several of them are foreign which means that it is quite difficult to find them with LibraryThing. I can type in the ISBN and some of them still do not show up. I guess I will just not be able to add those.

Other than that little hurdle, the cataloging process is going smoothly. It just gets somewhat redundant and tedious after a while, so I have been taking a lot of short breaks so I don't wear myself out too quickly. I still have about half of my library left to catalog and already have 73 items cataloged (not including the foreign books, of course).

Here is a widget with some of my books:

Tagged as: Library No Comments

3Mar/090

Research Proposal Completed

I’ve finally finished my research paper proposal for one of my history classes. The research paper is going to be about Reinhard Gehlen, but I have discussed that in a previous post. I feel a lot better about the paper now though because I now have a clear direction in which I want to head with the paper. I now know exactly what I am going to argue and how I’m going to go about doing it with the sources I’ve found.

There are a couple of books that I would really like to use, however, one of them is currently checked out and isn’t due back until May and the other book isn’t available at the library at my university. I put in a request to get it from Colorado State University’s library through our Interlibrary Loan Service, but who knows how long that will take. I probably won’t get it until the end of this month or even later. Unfortunately it’s a primary source, which is important. The book is the memoirs of James Critchfield who worked with Reinhard Gehlen directly. Critchfield worked on the CIA side of things, so it would be interesting to get that perspective. As of now, I just have Gehlen’s perspective which, without the other perspective, is quite biased. Hopefully I will get it soon enough to be able to use it as a resource for my paper.

Tagged as: Reinhard Gehlen, Research Proposal No Comments

27Feb/096

LibraryThing

So I broke down and decided to catalog my ever-growing personal library. I chose to use an online tool called LibraryThing because it seemed like a good way of keeping track of everything. There are other tools out there that I considered, many of which are offline, however most of the cost money and I didn't want to spend money on something when I can get it for free. LibraryThing seems like a good tool. I haven't cataloged my entire library yet, only what I happen to have on hand with me at the moment. All 38 books. I have a much larger collection of books that I still need to move to my apartment at some point.

If you are interested, you can view my library here. I will also be putting a link to my library catalog as a button on the right side of the blog so readers can view it at anytime.

If you have any books that you think I should add to my library or any comments, feel free to leave me a comment on this post or any other post.

Here is a widget with some of my books:

Tagged as: Books, Library 6 Comments

26Feb/092

Oldest English Words

The BBC is running an interesting article about the oldest words in the English language. Researchers are currently saying that they believe the oldest words still in use in modern English are "I", "we", "two" and "three" which date back tens of thousands of years. They also cite words such as "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" as words that will go extinct. Here is a portion of the article:

Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.

Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct - citing "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" as probable first casualties.

"We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading.

"We fit a wide range, so there's a lot of computation involved; and that range then brackets what the true answer is and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time."

Tagged as: English, Language History, Words 2 Comments

1Feb/090

Translation Services

This really has nothing to do with history, but I thought I would be a staunch self-promoter here as well as my other blogs:

As part of my on going adventures with the German language, I provide translation services from both German to English and English to German. If you are looking for someone who can translate any length of document for relatively cheap, then look no further!

English is my native language and I have 9 years of experience with the German language. I have lived, worked and studied in Germany. For typewritten or digital documents, websites or anything else digital, I charge US $0.08 or 0.06 euros a word. For handwritten documents, I will need to see the document before I can provide a price as handwritten documents can be far more difficult to decipher.

Please contact me at seifertalex [at] gmail [dot] com. If you would prefer to contact me by phone, please first contact me by e-mail and I will send you my phone number.

Tagged as: German No Comments

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