Hello, Violent World

For students of computer science, the first step into a new programming language usually begins with the obligatory "hello, world" program. This exercise has been repeated in hundreds of languages as a way of introducing students to their diverse structures, vocabularies, and meanings. As I take my first step into the online community with this weblog, this post is both an introduction for me to this new medium as well as an introduction for readers to the central themes that will shape my writing here in the future.

Our world, as we all know, is an extremely violent one. Like everything else in the world, this violence has a history. As a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, I have dedicated the forseeable future of my life to the study of that history. History and violence will be the focus of most of the discussions here. My interest in these topics emerged from my experience in struggles for social justice, where my efforts in recent years have been concentrated in the antiwar movement. Perhaps as a result of the fact that I still haven't locked myself into a dissertation topic, it still feels perfectly natural to talk about a wide range of material. Right now I'm bouncing around ideas on subjects as diverse as the recent Cheney hunting debacle and a review of the new video game Civilization IV.

My goal here is to create a space where I can write about an exciting range of topics related to history and violence that will complement my academic work while allowing me to branch out into new areas. For readers, I hope that the overarching themes of history and violence will bridge the diversity of material to create an eclectic but coherent website worth coming back to. For myself, I hope that this space will continue to provide an outlet for my interest in these subjects long after I shackle myself to a specific dissertation topic. That being said, I'm sure it will develop into something that I can't predict at this point, and I look forward to seeing what that is.

[Above center: The "Hello, world!" program in Ada, the primary computing language of the United States Department of Defense.
Above left: A soldier works on his computer.]