About
About Me
My name is Richard Caccavale and I live in Denver Colorado with my wife, Lisa Houlihan and our cockatiel, Blake. We live in central Denver, near City Park and we enjoy the city as well as the mountains here in Colorado. In my spare time I enjoy skiing, hiking, snowshoeing, biking, SCUBA diving, and of course, photography.
I work in Educational Technology for Blackboard, having joined the company through its merger with WebCT, where I had worked since 1999. In my opinion, there isn’t a better field than educational technology. It enables me to combine my passion for life-long education with my love of new technologies.
About This Site
The editorial perspective of this site may seem a bit eclectic, but I write about my interests, which change in priority on a regular basis. Therefore, the concentration of my writing on one topic or another is likely to change as well. One week might contain several posts on photography and the next will focus on issues in higher education. That is just the way I am.
Why herodot.us?
My previous website was looking a bit 20th century, so being in need of a new website, I decided to explore new domain names. Just for kicks I sat down with a rhyming dictionary and started looking for combinations that could make up words ending in “us,” like del.icio.us. Not surprisingly, just about every combination of every common word is taken already. Then I saw Herodotus and thought, “wow, the founder of history, narrative history, that would be perfect.” I entered the combination that you are viewing now and got ready for another rejection, but, I got a pleasant surprise.
Herodotus and Charles Olson
Herodotus of Halicarnassus lived in the 5th century BC and is known for writing The Histories, a collection of writings about the people and places he encountered in his travels. He is known as “the father of history,” but he is also known for his liberal embellishment of the facts in favor of the story. Thus the quote in the masthead from Charles Olson who wrote historical narrative poetry about American themes. A longer version of the quote from “Letter 23″ of The Maximus Poems: “Thus Thucydides, I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking for oneself for the evidence of what is said….”Olson’s dismissal of Thucydides in favor of Herodotus is his dismissal of scientific history for the more romantic notion of the importance of human experience, no matter its subjectivity.
Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War is considered the first work of scientific history, privileging facts and documents over Herodotus’s narative of experiences. Olson’sMaximus Poems is an American history written through the perspective of a fictional Maximus about his experiences in Gloucester, Massachusetts.For more information you can read about all these people on Wikipedia, but one thing should be clear. The web is full of documents of history and personal sites such as this one are to the established media as Herodotus is to Thucydides. Unlike many of the blogs out there, I am not looking to take on the mainstream media; I am just building a place to tell my stories through words and images, and sometimes the facts are not the most important information to communicate.
