Goals

The first goal of Beautiful Spaces is to expose, and even revel in, the deep inner architecture of the historian's craft; to lay bare the relationships between primary sources, stages of analysis, and narration (or other forms of text construction).

In a sense, Beautiful Spaces is my meditation on the possibility of deconstructing and reconfiguring the process of "doing" history. I strive to bring these essential modes of working through the documentary record of the past together in this virtual space, and at the time same to disrupt the expected progression from interrogation of primary sources to production of a polished prose argument. This project is designed to level the playing field, so to speak. It does not privilege the latter over the former. It assigns equal weight to individual items and to the narrations that emerge from them. It continually points out pathways leading, often unexpectedly, from one piece of evidence to another. In fact, it is built on the principle that relationships - relationships between people, places, things, ideas, texts, etc. - are the mortar of history.

The second goal of Beautiful Spaces is to function as a spatial history of Crimea. The project studies the history of Crimea (the peninsula itself but also the full range of territories claimed by the Giray khans prior to 1783) through a spatial lens, assessing the value of the concepts of space and place, distance and proximity, density and diffusion, as tools of historical analysis.

The third goal of the project is to convince you to fall in love with Crimea, with the practice of history, and with maps.