Peter Onuf’s thoughts on MOOCs are worth your time. Because confirmation bias is my favorite kind of bias, two points in the interview stand out for me: first, producing a reasonably high-quality MOOC costs a ton of money, so much so that even at UVA and with the help of Coursera, Peter’s team truncated his course because of the expense; and second, that Peter, despite coming out of the experience relatively sanguine about MOOCs, thinks such courses aren’t necessarily well suited to the humanities.

Megan Kate Nelson, who’s a terrific writer and historian, has started blogging. Her first post challenges readers to choose which quote comes from which Midnight Rising (one is Tony Horwitz’s study of John Brown, the other is an erotic thriller). Take a look!

The very nice people at the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College invited me to give a talk about Sand Creek, and C-SPAN broadcast the debacle live. So if you’ve been waiting for an opportunity to watch me looking very uncomfortable and fumbling for words, you’re in luck. Here’s a link to the talk (which I will never, ever, not in a million years, watch).

Jonathan seems to have figured out a way to make the newspapers look non-terrible. If you’d like to take a look, you can click the thumbnail below.

My former colleague and dear friend Susan Schulten has a great piece about the relationship between war and geography up at The New Republic. Check it out!

Jonathan and I now have a final draft of Battle Lines ready. If you’d like to take a look and gently remind us, as one reader did a few months ago, that cotton wasn’t typically grown in Virginia in the 1840s, we sure would appreciate it.

Really, it’s too late for us to make major structural changes, but we’re very, very eager to root out any errors that have survived to this point in the writing process. This is especially true in the case of the newspaper stories, which are relatively text-dense and which I fear haven’t been vetted as carefully as the rest of the book.

Anyway, let me know if you’d like to kill some time by helping us out. If I hear from you, I’ll send you a link that should allow you to download a reduced-size file of the entire book. But be warned: even reduced, it’s still huge. Thanks!

Like the latte-sipping, arugula-eating, Volvo-driving liberal I am, I don’t really mind paying taxes. I do, though, find Donald Duck annoying. I wonder, do liberals and conservatives admire different cartoon characters?

Janet Napolitano eschews the Oxford comma, a sin for which I cannot forgive her, but at least she holds views on online education that are relatively sane:

“It’s not a silver bullet, the way it was originally portrayed to be. It’s a lot harder than it looks, and by the way if you do it right it doesn’t save all that much money, because you still have to have an opportunity for students to interact with either a teaching assistant or an assistant professor or a professor at some level.”

She also notes that preparing online classes costs money and suggests that high-achieving students, who tend to do well regardless of the circumstances in which they’re taught, benefit the most from online education. Which is to say, she’s familiarized herself with the (admittedly as-yet not definitive) literature on the subject. Coupled with her insistence that UC faculty wear TSA uniforms, I’m liking her more and more.

You might want to take a look at this thoughtful post from my dear friend Ben Alpers about his struggles writing a second book. My sense, having recently published a second book of my own, is that Ben’s struggles are by no means his alone. At any rate, I think this is a brave piece. Bravo, Ben.

This list contains books that have been ordered in some way. Beyond that, I can’t say that I’m clear on what’s happening here. Still, it’s something to fight about!