Monday, November 14, 2005

This Week

Now that I am back from London and my folks have returned to California I hope I can get some outstanding projects finished. First, I still have a number of job applications to submit. I wish I knew which jobs were actually conducting a search and which ones already had somebody picked out ahead of time. Except for a few isolated cases I suspect that the search committee just throws my application in the trash without bothering to read it at all. They may wait until they get the affirmative action form back confirming that by their definition I am a White male. But, I seriously doubt that very many of the search committees read anything else I send them.

Outside the world of gambling with very bad odds, I have some more writing projects to polish. I need to give a final editing to my cotton paper before sending it off to London for publication. I also need to start sending out queries to get my dissertation published as a book. I do not think I will ever hear back one way or the other from the publisher in Reading. I also noticed that there is another new academic journal on genocide studies out. It just issued a call for papers. I may write something up and submit it.

As far as blog entries this week, I am going to take a rest from posts on cotton in Central Asia. The last entry summarized what I think are all the important points that came out of the conference at SOAS. Rather I am going to do more local stuff. I have a digital camera now and I think I can figure out how to use it. So I am going to try and post some pictures of the ranch. Also I got an e-mail from a friend of mine requesting more entries on Arivaca Man cuisine. So I will have some practical information posted here for a change.

Currently my South West history reading is on the 9th Cavalry from 1867 to 1898. This was one of two African American Cavalry regiments formed after the Civil War. They played an important role in the war against the Apaches here in Arizona. My recent Eurasian reading has been on the development of the Pakistani state and the Soviet GULag. If anybody has any suggestions for good books on either the South West, particularly southern Arizona from 1853 to 1898 or Eurasia, particularly Central Asia from 1917 to 1987 let me know.

1 comment:

Chris O'Byrne said...

My current heist from the Arivaca Library netted me the following:

A Traveler's History of Mexico
-a brief history of Mexico from prehistory until the present

Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border

A Papago Traveler: The Memoirs of James McCarthy
-about a Papago Indian who was born in 1895 and became a world traveler

The Guaymas Chronicles
-an anthropological field narrative of Northwest Mexico in the late 1960s and early 1970s