The Scribbler's Shack on YouTube!

The Scribbler's Shack is now on YouTube! The first episode is about the Plague Doctor as a symbol of historical disease, in which I refrain from ranting about how it has become a medieval malapropism. On this site, I'm going to be writing companion essays, providing bibliographies, and reflecting on my foray into online history and video essays.

I have spent a long time thinking about how I want to use social media and blogging this time around. I have done the bulk of a Public History MA, which has been time-consuming and challenging, but I've learned a lot and now I'm ready to put that knowledge into practice!

I love watching video essays and videos about history, but there seems to be little overlap between the two. Most video essays are about films/TV/games/random interesting things. Most history videos are highly produced by organisations or they're about, dare I say it, middle-aged man history. None of these things is bad, obviously. I just wanted to make something similar, with my own style and interests.

My main reservation about starting this is that it means I would leave the book community. But I haven't been engaging as much with the book community recently anyway. For a community that is supposed to be about a joint love of literature, the whole thing can get tiring, let's be real. The history community (for lack of a better phrase) can be tiring in its own way, so I'm not even really escaping that.

This is something I've experienced for all my academic life: the competing history and literature student inside me. I've been trying to drop English Literature since I was 15, but I keep getting my best marks for it and then I switched from straight History to joint honours English and History on A-Level results day. After graduating, I thought I had put the subject behind me for real, but it turns out I'm still reading literary criticism (even though I never have and never will understand what those academics are on about).

I've realised over these many months since starting this blog that I don't need to separate my history and literature interests, no matter academia's obsession with compartmentalising subjects. To me, literature is history (Stephen Greenblatt, anyone?) and history is literature (thank you, Hayden White). That's why I've kept the name for this blog and channel fairly vague. This isn't History with Mimi or Mimi's Book Musings. This is The Scribbler's Shack where we sit down with the internet and think about how the past is, and always has been, an important part of how we understand the world's infinite complexity.

So I hope you will come on my journey with me, whether it's just for a quick video or to read my self-reflective musings. And I promise I will get better audio and find an editing software without a watermark ASAP 🤦