Two Ohio State history professors have developed a media outlet where headlines meet history.

Steven Conn and Nicholas Breyfogle co-edit Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, an online magazine that explores how current events, people and places relate to history. The magazine has covered everything from Somali pirates to women’s rights in Afghanistan.

Conn said their goal is to “bring top-flight academic expertise to a wider public audience.”

While there is more information available in an age of cable television and the Internet, “a lot of it is pretty superficial and a lot of it is not very good,” Conn said.

“So what we do is give people a chance to take a step back from current events and really think about the context of all of this.”

Every issue features an in-depth article, written by an academic expert, about a current event or series of issues in the news that also provides a historical context.

The most recent issue, published Friday, was written by Conn. It is a look back on Charles Darwin’s enduring influence in 2009, the 200th anniversary of the father of evolution’s birth.

Origins originated when Breyfogle and Conn were both graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. During the mid-’90s, Breyfogle came up with a prototype for the magazine in print form, which was published for two years.

Then about three years ago, Conn and Breyfogle began discussing plans to recreate the project in an online format.

In October of 2007, the first edition of the re-established Origins was published through the department’s eHistory site, which focuses on digital teaching tools.

At first, the editors only published articles written by other professors in OSU’s history department. However, when looking for the best person to write an article on a particular subject, Conn said they sometimes had to look outside the department, and on occasion
even outside the university.

The previous issue’s article about child abductions, from 1874’s less-remembered Charley Ross to 2009’s Jaycee Dugard, was penned by Paula Fass, a professor of history at the University of California-Berkeley.

With such a wide range of issues covered, Conn said the intended audience could, and often does, shift from month to month.

“The audience that we have in mind, broadly speaking,” he said, “is that wide public who is interested, who pay attention, who want to engage with important issues but who aren’t academics. They don’t read stuff in scholarly journals with a lot of footnotes, with a lot of jargon.”

The magazine is also a part of the Public History Initiative, which Conn heads. Keeping Origins accessible to the wider public is one of the overall aims of the program.

Besides the magazine, the program also offers internships to students and works on community-based projects.

Lawrence Bowdish, a graduate student in OSU’s history department, is the managing editor. In an e-mail he said that Origins fulfills the goal of bringing history out of the academy and to the people.

“Too often, both in the press and in the public mind, major events seem to emerge out of the ether, with no background. Our job is to offer that background,” he said.

Last quarter, the Origins Web site reached 100,000 hits. Chris Aldridge, the Web developer for the Goldberg Center and the Web manager of the site, said that the tally was now up to 132,000.

Aldridge said articles usually contain many images including maps, charts and timelines. But the next step is lifting the material off the page through the use of video and interactive content.

Origins is already available as a podcast and through RSS, and Aldridge said they would like to make it available on e-readers in the future.

If journalism is the rough draft of history, as was once said, then what exactly is Origins? Conn is quick to point out that it is not journalism, and at the same time not scholarly writing. Conn said he thinks of it as a “thoughtful meditation” on past issues.

And while learning about history has merit in itself, Conn added that there are practical purposes as well. “The past is really interesting to us insofar as it informs the present,” he said. “It helps us to make sense of this world we live in right now. That’s what Origins tries to do.”