Why the Change?

By now, I'm sure you all have noticed the sporadic topics of conversation on this blog and trust me there is a very good reason. For is there a better reason than wanting to keep your DP?

My blog is now my project for my journalism degree and to try and fit it into a singular topic, I decided on history. But why history? For those of you who do not know me, I love history, it has been my favourite subject since high school and I have done two more years of it in university. There is something alluring to me, looking back in time with the gift of hindsight and judging those who were there before. It's simply magical. The wonderful mistress that is history grabbed my soul in the eighth grade when I was studying the French Revolution. Nothing fancy, just one of the most important revolutions of all time without which a certain country run by a president who looks like that Tupperware that you kept spaghetti bolognaise in for three days, would not exist. I was simply fascinated that something that seemed so small, affected the world in such a massive way and I wanted to know more and more and more until my history teacher eventually kicked me out of the classroom because apparently "Break time is not just for students". My education did not stop at school; almost every day I would go home and watch John Green's Crash Course on Youtube, which I highly recommend. This love eventually burned into a shining star that guided me to do history at a university level, which then promptly exploded into a vast supernova.

Besides my personal love for history, I decided to make it the focus of this blog because I simply could not find enough history-centred blogs. And the ones that I did find were all super serious and written in a news article style. Herein lies the key difference in A Bird's Eye View; I will be writing short anecdotes and stories and I will try to write it in the casual and humorous tone that I seem to have trapped myself in. Thus*, I have decided to split the blog into two categories: "Fantastic Figures", in which I will be discussing historical figures that inspired folklore, legend or anyone that tickles me pink; and "History's Biggest Fuck-Ups" where I will be sharing stories that went horrendously and wonderfully wrong. I chose these two categories because I feel that these would be the most interesting to the casual reader, i.e those who do not care that some primitive spearhead made by someone called Ugg was found buried in a lady's flowerbed. I wanted this blog to be something someone would read in bed or on their daily commute to pass the time and to get a small chuckle out of them.

I feel that history as a subject, as well as those who study it, suffer from a crippling stigma: that they are boring. As a history boffin, that physically hurts my soul. History is not just some black and white sheet of paper, read out by a bearded monotone Marxist. Instead, it is an ever-shifting and dynamic fabric that changes from one point of view to another and that is what the general public does not see. People focus on the World Wars and the Industrial Revolutions and not on the amazing person that was Robert Smalls - who I will not go into detail about just yet as that man deserves his own post - or on the amazing event that was the Fourth Crusade, which you will hear me talk about a lot so you might as well get used to it now.

This blog is not just for you, however. It is also for me. I have to do something with all this knowledge and you cannot complain like all the innocent bystanders that happened to cross me because you willingly clicked on this link and now you are stuck here. Welcome. But seriously, history and writing are my passions and being able to combine them in this way feels amazing. I truly hope that we can all discover something new on our journey through history together. It is going to be brilliant.

*"Thus" is an archaic word meaning "getting to the point" and is only used by academics named Ruth, Alan, Ethel or any similar archaic names, and by people who wish to sound intelligent. I do not have to identify with either side and I resent the implication.