I have two semesters left before I graduate from college. That means I will be finished in May 2010. Afterwards I want to teach English or American history somewhere in Germany, but I don’t know how I can go about getting that kind of position. I want to be in Germany for at least two or three years to solidify my German. It doesn’t matter who I teach. A Gymnasium (German high school equivalent) is good or a university or an institute would work as well.

Does anyone happen to know where I could look online? It’s a bit early for it, but I want to start now so I can start directly after I graduate.

In the month since the university has been out for the summer, I have to admit that I haven’t had much motivation to write any entries about history. I haven’t researched anything nor have I really read anything pertaining to history. I have finished a couple of Mark Twain books and a book with short vampire stories, but other than that, I haven’t really read anything. Which brings me to this entry’s topic.

I’ve given it a bit of thought about why exactly I study history. The answer is fairly straight-forward I think. I’ve always had a strong fasciation for the past and for some unexplainable reason, a particular interest in the 19th century. I remember when I was a young child at my grandparents’ house when my grandmother would show me old photos of her grandparents and great-grandparents. I always marveled that the people in the old sepia photographs who I was looking at lived in a completely different time and century when things were much simpler.

Even today I think that same drive is behind my fascination with history. I am obviously a modern student in a modern world, who has a fancy laptop, a couple of websites, a couple of blogs, a cell phone, a Facebook account, several gigabytes of music, etc, etc — all of the so-called modern necessities for people of my age; and yet, even I often feel overwhelmed and feel the need to just reject all of this technology and go back to a more basic life. Studying history gives me the ability to simply disappear into a simpler world in which these modern marvels do not exist and to try to experience what life would have been like before electricity or the advent of microchips.

It may seem strange for the son of a computer programmer who is only 21 years of age and who has grown up with computers all of his life to feel this way, but I often do. When doing research, I prefer to use books in the library and read articles in physical journals and take notes with a notebook and pen rather than finding resources online and taking notes digitally as so many of my peers do. I know it is not as efficient and if pressed for time, I will resort to that, but I feel that if you enjoy the research, why does it matter how long it takes?

When I was much younger, the computer was virtually my life. I’ve created programs on multiple platforms, I’ve experimented with different flavors of Unix and Linux and I’ve done websites since I was 11 and the web was hardly anything but a sparse collection of text. I am by no means computer-illiterate or technology-shy (to be perfectly modest…) as many people I know who prefer to do things the old fashioned way. For me, it is simply a choice.

That is why I study history. Not only do I find it absolutely fascinating from an academic approach, but it is a means of escape, I suppose, where a body can disappear to a time before Facebook and MySpace, a time when calling somebody meant visiting them in person, a time when riding shotgun implied carrying an actual shotgun and a time when things were simpler.

This is a duplicate post from my history blog, History Rhymes.

I, like most people I know of my generation, have an extremely strong web presence. Facebook, MySpace, StudiVZ, Last.fm, WordPress.com, BlogCatalog and DeviantArt are just a few of the social networking sites that I have an account for. Of course that does not even include the other sites I have accounts for that are not technically social networking sites — websites such as Google and Amazon.com.

You have probably read it somewhere else before, but with the conveniences that these services provide comes the high price of anonymity and privacy. While some sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, are obviously much more attuned to the destruction of one’s privacy than businesses such as Amazon.com who use your personal information for business purposes (such as sending a package to your home address when you place an order), each time you sign up for a new account on a different website, a little bit more of your privacy disappears.

Unfortunately for someone of my age (a college student), having accounts on sites such as Facebook and MySpace are practically imperative for your social life. Let’s say you meet someone at a party who you would like to hang out with later or stay in contact with. The first thing they ask you isn’t for your phone number or your e-mail address, it’s whether you have a Facebook account. It’s gotten to the point that the only people you give your phone number to are your closest circle of friends. Receiving a text message is a far more private matter than receiving a message on Facebook. Why? I can’t really explain that.

Again, the biggest problem with this is the matter of privacy. While Facebook does allow you to change your privacy settings and you yourself can control what information about yourself you post to the social networking site, you can’t control what other people put on there. For example, I have always taken the precaution of not posting pictures of myself on the site; however, I am still somehow connected to over 100 different pictures of me that have been posted by other people. Facebook even furnishes a convenient link to these pictures right on my profile page. It is virtually impossible to control this.

On a side note, some may argue that keeping a blog destroys one’s privacy. That is not true unless the blogger wishes it to be so. While with blogging people have the ability to write about their personal lives or post private pictures (and no, I’m not talking about just naughty pictures), the beauty of it is that the writer has the ability to post whatever he or she wants and therefore the freedom to disclose or conceal whatever information about themselves to the world they want to.

The biggest concern I have with these privacy matters is largely two fold. First of all, I don’t think any government agent should be able to access my private information without probable cause, which is absolutely something he or she could do if it was generically posted online. The second concern I have is that future employers will ‘research’ me on the internet. I find it absolutely absurd that potential employers could justify not hiring me just because they found out about a party I went to or what my political or religious opinions are. That to me is an enormous violation of privacy and therefore I want to reduce the risk because the sad truth is that it actually happens.

In order to combat this potential problem, I have decided to attempt to reduce my web presence. This is by no means an easy task. Unfortunately in most instances, what you post on the web, stays on the web. Fortunately I have never posted anything too terribly private. I have begun by deleting my MySpace account. MySpace does not make it easy at all to cancel an account. They first make you confirm that you really want to three separate times, then they send you an e-mail with further instructions you have to follow in order to delete your account. In the e-mail you have to click a link where you are asked yet again if you really want to cancel your account. Then finally, they say your account has been ‘scheduled for cancellation’ and that it will take ‘up to 48 hours’ for the changes to take effect.

I would love to delete the other social networking accounts as well, but unfortunately it is the only way I have to contact a lot of people — especially a lot of international contacts I have. That is the hook. Once you start using the service, you’re essentially stuck if you want to keep in contact with most people.

As time goes on, I plan to systematically remove as many accounts as I possibly can. This task might sound easy, but in reality is quite difficult. Most services provide you with a way to remove your account and others just allow you to hide your account from public view, but most of these companies and websites keep your information despite requesting a deletion. We will see how many I end up actually deleting and how many I will deem necessary to keep.

The BBC is running an interesting article about the oldest words in the English language. Researchers are currently saying that they believe the oldest words still in use in modern English are “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” which date back tens of thousands of years. They also cite words such as “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as words that will go extinct. Here is a portion of the article:

Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.

Reading University researchers claim “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct – citing “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as probable first casualties.

“We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading.

“We fit a wide range, so there’s a lot of computation involved; and that range then brackets what the true answer is and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time.”

For anyone who is going to be working with the memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen, do not use David Irving’s translation of it, entitled: The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen. For a project I am working on, I have been dealing with both Irving’s translation as well as the original book in German written by Gehlen himself (Der Dienst: Erinnerungen 1942-1971). I read the German version cover to cover for this project and have been attempting to use Irving’s translation as a quick reference to check for facts, however, as I have been using the translation, not only is information missing from the original in his translation (I’ve had to check the original multiple times to verify it was actually there), but there are actually pages and pages of accounts and “memories” that don’t exist anywhere in the original!

The accounts may be true for all I know, but they are presented as though Gehlen told them (though he did not in his memoirs) and there are no references cited. It has been most frustrating and I do intend to report this inaccuracy to the university. Perhaps they will dispose of the book as anyone who is unable to read the German version would have no idea otherwise, possibly leading to inaccuracy.

For one of my history classes this semester, I am going to be doing a semi-lengthy paper on Reinhard Gehlen. This class is a historical methods class, however the focus of the class is the history of espionage. I was assigned the topic of Reinhard Gehlen because I can read German primary sources without the need to translate.

For those of you who have no idea who Reinhard Gehlen is, he was the a major-general in the German army during World War II. After the war, he was recruited along with several other high-ranking Nazi officials by the CIA to setup an spy ring directed against the Soviet Union. He is essentially considered the founder of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) which is more or less the German equivalent of the CIA.

For more information about him, click here.

I found a really interesting webpage that has a lot of information about the 1908 presidential election. The two candidates were William J. Bryan and William H. Taft. The most interesting part of the website though is that it includes two speeches recorded by each of the candidates. It was the first time any presidential candidate had had his voice recorded. The recordings were done on wax cylinders and could be purchased for 35 cents (about $8 in today’s money).

If you’re interested in listening to them, you can find them here. Bryan gives a speech about the financial crisis that was present at that time (and is surprisingly relevant 100 years later…) and Taft gives a speech about the “progress of the Negro” forty years after being freed from slavery.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should start a new blog based on British history and I think I will do just that. I know I already have History Rhymes, but I’ve dedicated that blog to American history and don’t really want to stray from that topic. I think it’s best to have separate blog for separate topics.

I haven’t quite decided what it’s going to be called or anything, but that will come soon I suppose. When it’s open, I will announce it here.

As I posted on my History Rhymes blog:

The topic of immigration is a touchy subject, but is nonetheless important. It has been an important part of American history since the founding of our country. It was important 150 years ago and it remains important still. For us in the west in modern times, it is a particularly sensitive issue it seems.

I don’t care to discuss too much the politics of immigration as it is quite a sensitive subject, but I will say that I fully agree with what President Teddy Roosevelt had to say about immigration in 1907:

“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”