I love Pepys’ Diary, a website that reproduces an entry from Samuel Pepys’ seventeenth-century journal every day, in blog format, with lots of hyperlinks so that you can learn about everything from the buildings of London to the (supposed) medicinal qualities of Wormwood.

There are other interesting predecessors of blogs. For example, I have on my shelf two books edited by G.P.V. Akrigg, A Jacobean Journal for the Years 1603-6 and A Second Jacobean Journal. Akrigg reproduces one real London diary entry for each day of each year in the early 1600s. The entries comment on major events, sensational crimes, foreign and military news, and recent publications. I do not know to what degree the diarists expected their writing to be public, but there was certainly no right to privacy under King James, and these diaries were all deliberately preserved.

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On the advice of Frederick

Emrich (who runs an excellent blog), I’m switching over from plain

old html to the fancy and free blog software provided by Movable (sic) Type.

The disadvantage is that I’ve had to change the address of this weblog.

Please change any bookmarks or links that you’ve established. The advantages

are: an easy way for me to blog from any computer anywhere; opportunities

for visitors like you to post comments (which I welcome); a search function;

and permanent URLs for each entry, so that people can more easily link

to specific posts.

Racine, WI: I’ve been told that the Republican Party has conducted

more than 50 randomized experiments to test which methods and

messages most efficiently persuade people to vote. My organization,

CIRCLE, has also funded and collected such randomized

field tests, although we are a nonprofit organization, so we can

only test completely neutral, non-partisan messages ("Vote for

someone this fall").

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Near Racine, WI: I’m at Frank Lloyd Wright’s beautiful Wingspread estate for a meeting of the Grant Makers’ Forum on Community and National Service. Yesterday, on my way here, I had a chance to visit the State Capitol in Madison, which I’d never seen before. The Capitol building was erected under then-Senator Robert (“Fighting Bob”) La Follette. I wanted to see it because I once spent most of a year studying his career. Some of the information I collected found its way into my New Progressive Era book, although I abandoned most of the historical detail. La Follette was a major figure, and a successful one insofar as he transformed his home state, passed major legislation in Washington, and drew millions of votes in two presidential campaigns. On the other hand, many of his favorite causes and greatest battles ended in defeat, and the Progressive movement faltered in the twenties. I believe that he faced several dilemmas that we still haven’t figured out how to solve:

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Colorado Springs, CO: I’m at a conference of developmental psychologists, talking about service-learning. To repeat a definition used below, “service-learning” is some combination of community service with academic work on the same subject. Almost half of American high schools claim to use this approach. Most of the important debates about service-learning are really about values: Do we want to produce caring citizens who are likely to volunteer and provide face-to-face services? Do we want to produce citizens who are aware of social problems such as homelessness and hunger and may later act politically? What kinds of social and political knowledge do we want to foster? And so on.

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