Happy New Year readers!

Over the holidays, I continued to read and post to Twitter (see my stream at right) and discovered that  History Carnival was looking for someone to host an upcoming carnival.  So, I’ll be hosting the History Carnival for February.  Please go to their website to submit nominations.

What is a blog carnival you ask?   Well, it’s not this kind of carnival, and it’s just a coincidence I’m hosting in February (although maybe I’ll work in something about Mardi Gras).  According to if:book, a blog carnival “is an interesting subculture of the web that has been adopted in certain academic, or quasi-academic, circles. A blog carnival is like a roving journal, a rotating showcase of interesting writing from around the blogosphere within a particular discipline. Individual bloggers volunteer to host a carnival on their personal blog, acting as chief editor for that edition. It falls to them to collect noteworthy items, and to sort through suggestions from the community, many of which are direct submissions from authors. On the appointed date (carnivals generally keep to a regular schedule) the carnival gets published and the community is treated to a richly annotated feast of new writing in the field.”

The original carnival was Carnival of the Vanities, started in 2002.  Medieval and early modern historians were a natural for this platform and started Carnivalesque a few years later in 2005, the same year that the History Carnival started.  For an example of a recent History Carnival, check out the January History Carnival at Writing Women’s History.  There’s even a clearinghouse for carnivals here.