Cliopatria Awards 2008: Best Writer

I have some spare time so it’s on with the nominations. I find Best Writer a difficult category to nominate for as it so often overlaps with best blog. I like Martin Rundkvist’s writing at Aardvarchaeology. David Gill does a great job of what it often the deliberately muddied waters of the antiquities trade. I’m not nominating either of them though because they’re writing about subjects which I find interesting anyway. Good writing should also get the reader interested in things which might appear really tedious. That’s why I’m nominating a military history blog.

That’s intentional flame-bait. I’ve gone through education untroubled by any serious military history so all I know about it is what I’ve seen on satellite television. It’s dull, simplistic and at worst just a series of arrows pointing between battlefields with little discussion of why anyone would be interested. It’s not even a fashionable subject in academia. Quite a lot of big History departments see no need for a military historian. Yet when you look at history weblogs, there’s a stack of really good, thought provoking military history blogs. The excellent Civil War Memory won last year and with good reason. If you want to show an example of what history blogging can do then that, or the 2006 winner Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, should be near the top of the list. 2007 was an off-year but Civil Warriors won best group blog.

My nomination is Brett Holman. Brett Holman takes what looks like a parochial subject and uses it to explore much wider questions about what society was like and why events unfolded the way they did in early twentieth century Europe. It’s a skill to be able to move from the specific to the general and Holman has it in abundance. Mind you I say something similar most years to no effect, so if he doesn’t win a Clio this year I’ll have to up the ante by claiming he’s cured cancer or something similar.