“This week has seen many momentous events throughout history, and while certainly less impactful on the world, it seems worth mentioning that it is also the first week that I author the column! My name is Ben, I am a sophomore majoring in History at UConn’s Waterbury Campus!”
Hello and welcome back to This Week in History. My name is Ben. Three years ago, I wrote the words above and now I’m a senior majoring in history and geographic information sciences at the University of Connecticut’s Storrs campus.
You may have guessed already, but this week in history is almost the last before I graduate in May. Soon, I’ll be gone, kaputt, going overboard — going the way of the Dodo bird, if you will. But I mean that only metaphorically. I’m more ready than ever to be moving on and I’m more grateful than ever to have been the writer for this column over the past three years.
This issue is the second-to-last I’ll write before graduation. Grab a paper on Friday, May 2, for the final special issue of This Week in History for the year. In it, you’ll get to meet the brilliant writer who will be (peacefully) taking over the column. I’m thrilled to be passing the torch, and thankfully, everything this writer creates is fire!
To celebrate such a big change in this column — and my life — I wanted to devote this article to one thing: This Week in History.
It all begins with our legendary founder Seamus McKeever. Little is known of this 2019 UConn graduate, except that he was a history and finance major and wrote This Week in History starting in 2016.
I tried to get the first-ever This Week in History, but his earliest pieces are stuck in limbo. The Daily Campus shifted to online publication in November 2019, meaning that online archives started that year.
Even worse, the DC no longer saves any print issues from after that period, ending that process in 2013. The only way to access the year would be to go into the Dodd Center Archives and request the papers from 2016. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to do this, but maybe some future bright This Week in History writer will take on this challenge.
That said, from the articles preserved between 2017 and 2019 on the DC website, McKeever had a keen eye for all sorts of history, from sports to pop-culture. His writing style followed a simple concept: list a date and tell the history. He’d pick three to four events every article, and his chunky paragraphs are as satisfying to a history nerd’s eyes now as they were in 2019.
But it was over all too soon. McKeever graduated in 2019, leaving the column in the hands of Gino Giansanti, another icon of this column.
Giansanti wrote with a passion for history that I have yet to find elsewhere. He pieced together more in-depth historical coverage and added his own flair, like including how many years it had been since an event took place. He wrote with a fervor from September 2019 to May 2022.
Giansanti never met McKeever; he instead took a leap into the unknown after he got an email from the history advisors, in which McKeever was desperate to find a writer to take the column on. From his senior column, it appears that Giansanti took This Week in History to new heights and in tandem, his career with The Daily Campus. Soon, he was a staff writer, and eventually became the Associate Life Editor.
I, like Gino, never met my predecessor for this column. I was a history major at UConn Waterbury during the pandemic, just barely getting by. If not through a contact with Kaitlyn Tran, the artist editor at the time, I would have never stumbled into a column which got my foot in the door of an organization which has changed my life.
Now, I’m leaving behind my roles as the Life Editor, Board of Directors at-large member and copy editor. The DC has been an incredible gift to me, and I’ll touch on that more in my senior column, like Giansanti did. Soon, the column will live on in a new writer’s brilliant writing.
I’m grateful that the convention of desperately reaching out to advisors to advertise a vacant column is over, although I did do that and was ghosted by the history department. Instead, This Week in History already has a brilliant new writer at the helm. Stay tuned, history nerds: The column lives on.
So, to McKeever and Giansanti — if you ever read this — thank you for establishing a column which now has six years of history unto itself. It has no doubt changed the lives of a lot of people for the better.
That’s all for This Week in History. I’ll see you one last time on Friday!