Why I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years

A special appeal to support Res Obscura on its Crystal Anniversary

I was 25 years old when I started writing the blog version of Res Obscura, which ran from 2010 to 2023 (and still exists here). This was the early summer of 2010. I was a second-year PhD student in history, living with two roommates in a 1920s bungalow on the east side of Austin.

And I was very dedicated to the idea that you should aim to write a new blog post every day:

The first few posts of Res Obscura, all written in an apparently rather frantic week in June of 2010.

This is a concept that the 40-year-old version of me, with two young kids and zero free time, cannot even begin to fathom.

It’s also a practice of the old internet that simply doesn’t exist anymore — one of many digital behaviors that was swallowed up by social media. That whole world of blogging (exploratory, low-stakes, conversational, and assuming a readership of people who had bookmarked your URL and who read it on a desktop or laptop computer) is almost entirely gone now.

My first two years writing Res Obscura in its blog format were great fun. I began to develop an intellectual community, forming contacts with, for instance, the wonderful Public Domain Review (founded 2011 and still going strong). I linked to and was linked to by a range of other history bloggers who I saw as kindred spirits, some of whom seem to have disappeared (BibliOdyssey) others of whom have become well-known writers (Lindsey Fitzharris).

It was pretty addictive when a post went viral. In those halcyon days when written blog posts about obscure historical subjects were viable sources of viral content, you could end up getting covered in international media for, say, discovering a cat’s paw prints on a 15th century Croatian manuscript.

Readership analytics for the pre-Substack Res Obscura, 2010-present.

That spike in readership around 2018 was partially from a post about 17th century food that, unexpectedly, led to me speaking about snail water on New Zealand public radio.

But by then, I was starting to move on. I was hard at work on my first book — the book I needed to write for tenure — and was becoming a bit dispirited by the increasingly click-bait nature of blogging, not to mention the tendency of social media to elevate toxic behavior and controversy over lovely and fascinating but totally uncontroversial things like the Croatian cat paw prints.

I also (then and now) have no appetite for short-form video content, and still less for the type of history explainer videos — “here’s a two hour deep dive into why this movie is historically inaccurate” or “everything you need to know about such-and-such famous person” — that seem to do well on YouTube.

Switching over to a Substack newsletter, in the summer of 2023, revived my interest in writing online. It felt like rejoining an intellectual community — not quite the same as the golden age of blogging in the 2000s, but something equally as lively, in a way that I don’t think quite gets enough credit in the 2020s.

From Weird Medieval Guys to Jillian Hess’s Noted to Justin Smith-Ruiu’s Fernando Pessoa-esque The Hinternet and the newsletters of well-known historians like David Bell (French Reflections), as well as the more general audience or politically oriented newsletters that still dig deep into historical topics (like John Ganz’s Unpopular Front and Derek Thompson’s newsletter), I would say that Substack is now the most interesting place online for discussions not just of history, but of humanistic topics as a whole.

Needless to say, there’s also a ton of people writing about the intersection of AI, technology and contemporary society (of which I would single out AI Log, Ethan Mollick’s One Useful Thing, Dwarkesh Patel, and Steven Johnson).

So why have I kept writing Res Obscura through all the changes of the world — and of my own life and interests — since the summer of 2010? Simple: I love sharing things I find interesting, especially things which are not available elsewhere online. Most of my posts are written because I search for information on something and don’t find it.

The niche nature of Res Obscura (from 17th century cocaine to Kinetoscopes to Henry James: the RPG) is precisely why I enjoy writing it.

I am deeply grateful that 15 years and 8,300 subscribers later, I have a place online where I can share idiosyncratic knowledge and writing with an equally idiosyncratic group of readers.

Now here’s the inevitable part where I ask if you would be willing to support my continued work. To that end, I have set up a special holiday discount valid until the end of December. Thank you for reading!

Help support Res Obscura for its next 15 years

Image of the week

A detail of a trompe-l’œil “dome” by the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna, Camera degli Sposi, Ducal Palace, Mantua, Italy. Featured in a 2011 Res Obscura post called “The Art of Fooling the Eye.”