Some Small Amount of Progress

I ended up spending most of today hanging out with Tom, a friend and former co-worker from the U of M.  We walked around downtown and the market in a vaguely touristy way.  I remembered a few times that I'd planned to take pictures.

Then I had a longish wait for the bus to get home, and ended up making some really useful progress on figuring how to approach the dissertation, esp. with regard to secondary reading/research that's chapter-specific.  How to handle the secondary sources for individual chapters has been a tough problem for me to tackle because of the structure of my dissertation, and it's something I've been putting off all month.

My dissertation is going to be a collection of essays, essentially, which all focus on a central topic.  Each chapter looks at a different time period and body of historiography (for instance, the third chapter is about the 1920s and 30s, when the Harvey Company branched out into "Indian Detours" and the secondary sources for that chapter deal with the history of tourism in the Southwest).  [For an overview of the Harvey Company, see this wikipedia article; I don't entirely agree with its presentation, but until I write my own overview... it's what I have to link to ;-]

I'd been going around in circles with regard to secondary lit., because my dissertation touches on too many fields for me to do a full lit. review in the introduction as is typical.  My solution is simple (and, ok, fairly obvious) - I'll footnote a short lit review for each chapter in each chapter, as appropriate.  I'm not entirely clear on why, but I feel much much better about actually starting to review my secondary research now.  Whew.