Going Public

This blog will start to become somewhat more public next month. The college where I work has asked its faculty to provide the bibliographic information for any publications, including blogs. These publications will be made accessible to students, starting in November. I don’t know how the college can make a blog more accessible, but I suppose that there might be a handout listing faculty blogs and providing a short description of each one. 

After thirteen years of activity, I have decided to go public with my blog and to identify myself as the author. Originally, when I created this blog, I didn’t want to hamper my job search efforts, and that’s why I chose a pseudonym. My son was in middle school at the time and once I learned about his social studies teacher creating a blog and encouraging others to do so, I decided to investigate the matter further and ended up creating the Red Moon Café. At the time, I had a seller account at Amazon and instead of creating a new pseudonym, I simply altered my seller name, changing it from FirstCityBooks to firstcitybook. I live in what is known as the first city of Kansas, and some of the businesses identify themselves as First City Photo or First City Quilts, for example. After Colonel Leavenworth violated his orders in 1827 and decided to build a fort on the western side of the Missouri River, in what was known as Indian Territory, the city of Leavenworth eventually sprang up to the south of Fort Leavenworth, starting in 1854, the same year that the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened up Kansas and Nebraska to settlement.

There might be a few things of interest at this blog to someone conducting research. One popular post, according to Blogger, is the one in which I describe my students investigating the dead at the Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery. Many of my students, while conducting their research, stumbled onto the death of Sgt. Frederick Wyllyams, who was killed outside of Fort Wallace in 1867 when the fort was attacked by the Cheyenne. His body was eventually moved when Fort Wallace closed down, and he was reinterred at Fort Leavenworth. Sgt. Wyllyams proved to be popular among my students because of the photograph of his body pierced by arrows.

Blogger tells me that there have been 94,524 pageviews of my blog. Not all of them have been me. Peter Bacon’s Jazz Breakfast carries a link to my blog. Dave Sumner’s Bird Is the Worm used to carry a link to my blog before he redesigned his website. Dean Minderman at St. Louis Jazz Notes has also included my blog in his annual list of blogs and websites that evaluate the best jazz releases for the year.

I probably have gotten the greatest number of hits when I provide a link to a new post on Twitter. It is something that I need to do more often. My accounts at Twitter, Bandcamp, LibraryThing, and SoundCloud all provide a link to my blog and identify me as firstcitybook. It is much easier to dig into my Internet presence by looking for firstcitybook than by looking for James Cooper because there are so many other people with my name. Only my students refer to me as Dr. Cooper.