Full Stack Human

History, lifelong learning, open education -- a prolific content creator & teacher!

On Wednesdays, I want to highlight the work of other Substackers I admire. This past week I got reacquainted with

Dan Allosso

, whose online reading group I joined for a few months. He’s an avid Obsidian user (Obsidian is a PKM or personal knowledge management system), a professor of history (currently relocating to the Twin Cities in Minnesota), and a prolific video creator, podcaster, writer, and teacher.

I have no idea how he does all that he does! Here is a sampling.

Note-taking

I first got to know Dan through his work on note-taking methods for reading and scholarly work, especially as applied in your own PKM system. I’m an avid reader, but I struggle to write down what I’m reading and thinking and to keep useful notes. Creating a techne or organized framework of knowledge and practice is an important goal for me, and note-taking methodologies and platforms help determine what kinds of notes to take and how to link them together. Visualizing interconnections is helpful, for example using Obsidian’s graph feature, or Heptabase’s whiteboards. (← I switched from Obsidian to Heptabase more than a year ago.)

Explore Dan’s work on note-taking here: Note-Making | MakingHistory and Lifelong Learning | Dan Allosso | Substack

Open education

Anyone who has bought textbooks for a college course has been stupefied, I’m sure, by the exorbitant cost. Especially in the hard sciences, you’re usually obliged to purchase the most recent edition, and each book can easily cost more than $200. When my kids took courses at the local community college, it was not unusual for their textbooks to cost more than tuition!

Dan has been working assiduously to change this situation by publishing high quality open textbooks for his own courses and for free use by the public, including us lifelong learners!

Explore his posts on open education: Open Ed | MakingHistory and Lifelong Learning | Dan Allosso

Great Books

I had to chuckle when Dan posted about “unboxing” his new-used collection of Great Books.

Personally, I inherited my set from my mom. I was intimidated by them as a child in their august-looking bookcase. All the tiny print laid out in two neat columns, and the scary-sounding authors made an impression. As an adult, I am thankful to have been exposed to all those classics of Western Civilization, and I agree with Dan about the achievement of the Syntopicon indices (and essays) created by Mortimer Adler for inter-relating the Great Ideas collected in all those Great Books. Talk about an astonishing techne! And it was all done before the age of computers.

All lifelong learners should be aware of the Great Conversation and Adler’s now rather dated How to Read a Book. I’m sure my kids remember our family adventures exploring passages selected from the philosophers, historians, and literary giants of that set. In the end, for homeschool purposes, we usually read in depth and more systematically from updated translations and editions.

Dan on the Great Books and related: Great Conversation | MakingHistory and Lifelong Learning | Dan Allosso

Lifelong learning

Similar to how I recently decided to incorporate my separate Pondercraft publication directly into my main Pose Ponder substack, Dan has also consolidated his separate Lifelong Learners into his primary MakingHistory. He reached out to me when I re-dedicated to writing more on lifelong learning topics. Given that we have so much in common, I think we should do some collaboration.

There are other writers on Substack also engaged in lifelong learning either as adults or as part of homeschooling their families, or as inspired by the Great Books — not to mention a large and growing PKM community online.

American History & Primary Sources

Then there’s Dan’s day job, which I haven’t even touched upon yet!

He’s a historian of American and environmental history and has done significant work on related primary sources, especially the writings of the 19th century Freethinkers. One of the main challenges of teaching history is to help students get beyond the rather canned and warmed over — or, worse, revisionary and politically motivated — interpretations of history textbooks and historiographers (= writers about history). Using primary sources is usually touted as the answer. On the other hand, teaching primary sources can be equally challenging for reasons of access, archaic language, lack of context, and the sporadic evidentiary nature of what’s available. Historians are always working to piece together the snippets of the past that have come down to us. This situation is not bad at all when it comes to American history, since so many sources are available. It’s a far more difficult problem when dealing with the distant past.

Although… when I was studying the Church Fathers (major Christian writers from the 2nd to 8th centuries), I often found the case to be both over- and under-determined. Patristic “great works” have come down to us as extensive wholes, and their corpuses (collected works) can, frankly, be overwhelming in quantity and interpretive challenges, whereas, in contrast, we have comparatively little access to the majority of less great writers and the “everyday” historical backdrop. It’s too much and too little all at the same time.

In any case, history is never a project that results in you finding out literally “how it really was” in the past. There is always (re-)constructive and interpretive work to be done. As much as the past, with its scattered evidence and primary sources, makes its way forward in time to you today, the present gets read back into the past as we try to make sense of what’s gone before. For more on this hermeneutical (interpretive) issue, I recommend tackling some Gadamer, who — like Adler and the Great Bookies — recommends a conversational or dialogical approach. Engagement with the past is naturally a dialogue or conversation. Gadamer would say that you shouldn’t be surprised when the great thinkers of the past not only present you with facts and knowledge that you can try to assimilate into your existing working views, but they will even start interrogating you, questioning you, pushing you to revise your ideas and to realize how un-considered your deep assumptions really are.¹

(Thus while I agree with Dan on his assessment that Adler is a bit dated, I would disagree slightly that why we read is not primarily related to the historian’s task of collecting, i.e. facts and information to assimilate, but more related to the philosopher’s task of seeking wisdom. The Great Books aren’t there for us as oracles to be worshipped, with Adler admonishing us to “shut up and listen” — indeed — but they are there for their unique power to jolt us and challenge our fixities of mental habit. Shutting up and listening first, before assimilating, arguing, or criticizing, is a matter of intellectual humility. Those books are going to, as Gadamer suggests, usefully interrogate you — if you let them.)

Check out Dan’s original History research and posts of Primary Sources.

There are so many fascinating problems to do with history, which leads me to Dan’s perhaps best-known work on critiquing historiography.

How to Do History (Historiography, Critique)

Lately, as I’ve been trying to figure out where we are, who we are, as highly politicized humans in the Anthropocene — and pondering how to Keep Calm and Carry On amidst the loud dysfunction of our current system — I’ve landed especially on the American historical era of the Founders, who set up our constitutional democracy/republic in the first place, and on the late 19th century, early 20th century rise of Progressivism, a philosophy of governance that dominates much of our contemporary political landscape, most of the time unthinkingly so. I want to pick Dan’s historiographic brain on how the Progressive historians (and historians of Progressivism) have done their work, and (equally) how they are now being portrayed and rejected — as Unmakers of the original American Constitutional way — by thinkers on the (newish) right, e.g. the Hillsdale folks I’ve mentioned before. We have here again revisionary and politically motivated history writing, about which I am unsure how to proceed.

In any case, you’ll want to check out Dan’s writing on this important topic, related to his work as a professional historian.

Historiography | MakingHistory and Lifelong Learning

I’m so impressed with Dan’s prolific output and how he has accomplished so much in so many areas!

You’ll find his Substack MakingHistory and Lifelong Learning added to Pose Ponder’s recommendations, and I hope you’ll explore his work and consider subscribing.

Dan Allosso (photo from his Substack MakingHistory and Lifelong Learning)

1. Specifically on religious tradition, Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery is a sophisticated application of Gadamer’s general philosophical approach. (It is out of print, so you’ll have to request it from the library.) On a more popular level, I can recommend C.S. Lewis’ “On the Reading of Old Books,” originally published as an introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. (Reprinted online here.) This is the money quote from Lewis: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”