I saw this image in a feed today. It is from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark supposedly 1936. Initially I thought the geography of the movie was off and thought that it would have actually landed and taken off from Gander but doing some searching found that Gander Airport was not completed until 1938, St. John's in 1941 and Argentia in 1941.

I know it's just a movie but I'm aware that planes had been refueling in Newfoundland to prepare for transatlantic crossings before 1939 but the only mention I can find is Hr Grace Airport where Emilia Earhart started her flight.

My question is, where where all these planes stopping?

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lviv_pogrom_(June_-_July_1941).jpg#mw-jump-to-license

Hello everyone and welcome to the 13th installment of our continuing series of Rules Roundtables! This project is an effort to demystify the subreddit and also to gather your feedback to help improve it! At this point, however, we've covered just about every rule of the subreddit, so we're going to be getting more expansive in what we mean by "Rules" moving forward, and instead work to explain other aspects of the subreddit. So to kick off this new direction of the Rules Roundtable, we are going to be looking at the concept of Flair, both how it works, and how to get it! We'll also take a detour to explore a bit of what goes into self-study of historical topics, and to offer some pointers on how to guide your research.

###What is Flair?

Flair is that colorful little tag that sits next to the username of some of this subreddit's users! The text of the Flair denotes that they have expertise in that field, while the color of the Flair is used to denote the broader category that expertise falls into - you can see the color key on the sidebar. To earn Flair, users have to demonstrate that they possess a detailed level of knowledge in their chosen field, and that they are an active member of the /r/AskHistorians community. This is assessed through a "Flair Application", where they link 3 or more answers that they have recently written in the subreddit, and which is then evaluated by a panel of moderators.

###What is an Expert?

Here on /r/AskHistorians, we don't qualify the term 'Expert' simply by what degree you hold. It is our belief that there is a lot of value in longtime, in-depth self-study of a topic, and that an amatuer historian can play as important a role here as a trained professional. While nearly 50 percent are history grad students or have a graduate degree in a history related field, a large number are self-taught, and any degree they hold is in an unrelated field. We do not discriminate between hobbyists, and longtime professionals, and rather evaluate expertise based on the quality of one's work. Plenty of users who (claimed to) have history degrees have written quite awful posts in the subreddit, and plenty of users with no formal training have produced absolute gems.

When presented with a flair application, we evaluate the answers provided against the Historical Method, considering the construction and clarity of the answer, how the answer uses and engages with sources, and how the user engages with additional information and follow-up questions presented in the subreddit. While of course the mod team is not all-knowing for every single aspect of human knowledge, every application is evaluated by a number of mods (3 at minimum), and we make sure that the panel includes mods whose own field of study closely mirrors that of the applicant.

Now, if you already feel qualified, you can skip down a bit to where we explore the application process, or check out the Application Thread itself. But if you are interested in starting on your own independent studies, or simply want to see what "in-depth" might mean here, keep reading!

###How Do I Become One of These "Self-Taught Experts"?

Now of course, while it might be easy enough to conceptualize what a "trained professional" means, lets explore the idea of the self-taught historian a little more here! It is common enough to see users in META threads, or other subreddits when /r/AskHistorians is brought up, praise the quality of the material found here but also lament that they would never be able to know that much. Well, I'm here to tell you it is possible! Not that it is easy, of course, but that if you find something you are passionate about, and are willing to apply yourself seriously, you too could find yourself in the ranks of the /r/AskHistorians flaired users.

####1) "Doing History"

The most important thing to understand, however, is that it isn't simply a matter of reading X number of books and absorbing Y number of facts. Certainly, you should read voraciously, but how you use your knowledge is of vastly more importance than some hard metric such as that. As noted, when evaluating a flaired application we are doing so against the historical method, and your abilities here are what we are really concentrating on in our evaluation. With this in mind, the most important part of being "an historian" is the ability to grasp and digest content, to engage with it and use it critically, and to be able to understand various arguments' places within the larger historiography of a subject. "Doing History" is much more than memorization of facts and figures, and I'm sure many historians will echo my sentiments when I say "If I need to know the production numbers of the T-34, I'll check a reference book for that!" Everyone's study habits are different, so there is no "right" way to do it, but I'm sure some of the flaired users here will be happy to chime in with suggestions, and I would also urge you to check out or series on Finding and Understanding Sources, which provides a number of guides to help improve oneself in that regards, and further explain what is entailed here.

####2) What Sources?

But of course, to backtrack, while development of your History Skills™ is paramount, I did say that you need to read. A lot, both books and articles. But you shouldn't just be reading anything. A lot of time can be wasted simply for lack of direction, and being able to productively focus ones reading is perhaps one of the greatest hurdles for the amatuer historian, lacking that kind of support an institution might offer. What you shouldn't do is order whatever the first hit on Amazon.com is, or whatever is top-rated on Goodreads. Do some research on your research! Due your due-diligence. Make sure that you are reading books which are worth your time. There are many ways to gauge this, of course. The first line of defense are the "sniff tests" as I like to call them. Is the book from an academic press or a general, commercial publishing house? Who is the intended audience of the book, academics or the casual reader? Who is the author, and what are their qualifications? These are all pretty easy bits of information to track down, and can usually be answered with a quick Google search. Answering in the negative of course isn't an automatic disqualification of course - many commercial publishers still put out quality books, and respected academics will often write books for 'general consumption' - but they are nevertheless points to keep in mind. /u/caffareli's only slightly tongue-in-cheek "How to Judge a Book Without Even Reading It" is also worth checking out for this!

A bit more involved, but no less essential, is getting a sense of the book itself. Most academic works, when they are getting published, will get reviewed in various journals (or ignored and just listed in the "also received" section). These reviews can provide you with great insight into how well received the book is, and also help give you some advance information on where it fits within the larger historiographical picture. Online resources such as JSTOR or Project MUSE make these available, and H-Net.Org or Google Scholar also has many reviews available. Although access will be restricted in some cases, there are several ways that you can make use of these resources. If you are connected to an academic institution, you probably have access already. Congrats! If you are an alumni, you might be one of those fortunate enough to have an alma mater that provides alumni access, so you should check to see! And while you might not have a university library to go through, many public libraries will also have access, and you can visit the sites there. Additionally, some sites, like JSTOR, allow you to make a free account that provides very limited access, only a few papers at a time. And of course, this isn't just useful for finding book reviews, but also helps you gain access to journal articles that might be worth reading as well.

3) Finding Sources

Now though, I've explained a few ways by which to evaluate what you're planning to read, but finding what to read in the first place is hard in of itself! There are a few ways to go about this. One way is to check bibliographies and footnotes. See what your betters are citing! If you have read several books, and all of them keep citing the same source... perhaps it would be a good idea to track that one down too! "Source mining" like this can be a great way to find more material, but it also can be pretty easy to go overboard! I'll sometimes read a short journal article and by the time I'm done I've now got 15 more that I want to read! Pay attention to the accompanying notes, if the author has any, to get a better sense of the overall source, and especially in the case of an annotated bibliography, pay attention to what the author was using the source for. Afterall, not every book that an author cites was cited because it was good. Many might be there solely to be refuted.

Another way to build up a source list is Comprehensive Exam reading lists. "Comps" are, well, exactly what they sound like. A exam given at the graduate level to evaluate the competency and general understanding that the student has for their field. To prepare, students are expected to read literal mountains of material and to be versed in the historiography of the topic. What is important for us here though is that many schools make these reading lists available online! For instance, here are lists from Boston College, Rutgers, and Southern Mississippi. Similarly there are "Resource Guides" such as here or here, can provide you with access to additional material such as primary sources, although as with JSTOR/MUSE, not all may be accessible. Plenty more can be easily found with a simple internet search, and in fact /r/AskHistorians provides a list of several!

Now of course, having gone over all of this, I return to the original caveat. However you make your reading list, checking them off and simply reading them isn't exactly the point. To be sure, it would be at least a little hard to make it through all that without slightly improving your broader History Skills™, but you need to make sure that you are developing them, not just ensuring you will kick butt for any Jeopardy history category. As said previously, study and research methods are different for everyone, so I won't tell you how to do it, but find a method that works for you, whether that is highlighting and margin writing (in books you own please! Don't be the jerk who wrote in a library book!), or taking audio-notes to yourself as you plow through the book. Read a lot of books on the same thing, compare and contrast their approaches and presentation. Spend time thinking about points where they disagree. Make sure that you're taking the time to not just read the book, but evaluate and think critically about it, and how it fits into your broader readings.

###What Do I Need to Do to Get Flair?

OK, so either you already feel qualified, or else you've read the last segment and now have returned a year or two later, but regardless, you're ready to submit your application! We've already touched on some of what goes into an application, but lets cover what we list in the Application thread point by point now.

First, before you even apply, check out the Application thread and look through previous ones. Check out the applications of users who were approved, and those who weren't. We receive many applications from hopeful individuals, where unfortunately rejection is obvious after only a quick perusal. We can simply see that the answers are too short to have content we can evaluate, or lack any sources whatsoever. The most important thing to do when you are thinking of applying for flair is to step back and try to critically evaluate your own application as if you were a neutral observer, so as we go through this list, that is what you need to keep in mind.

Expertise in an area of history, typically from either degree-level academic experience or an equivalent amount of self-study.

OK, so much of this post has already been devoted to this topic, but it never hurts to run through it again. Perhaps you've written several very nice answers, but what is the underlying basis of them? It is all based off of the same source, or does they reflect the synthesis of many different readings?

The ability to cite sources from specialist literature for any claims you make within your area.

The lack of sources is a common reason that applications get rejected. Now of course, our rules don't preemptively require sources, but we prefer that they be there, and in terms of a flair application worthy response, we absolutely expect it. While an answer which sufficiently meets the requirements of the subreddit will be left standing, it is the answers which go above and beyond the requirements that belong in a flair application, and that means sources! Ideally, several of them! Because we judge expertise based on the answers demonstrated, rather than requiring proof of a degree or something, we need material that demonstrates why you are worthy of flair. When it comes to sources, this means more than listing a single book at the end of an answer. We want to be able to see that you can draw on multiple sources, and engage with them critically where necessary.

The ability to provide high quality answers in the subreddit in accordance with our rules.

Perhaps it goes without saying that answers need to be abiding by the rules, but you'd be surprised.We've had some linked in applications which just quote a block of text from Wikipedia and call it a day. "In-Depth and Comprehensive" is the watchword of the subreddit, and it holds especially true for a Flair Application. As with sources, we're looking for answers that go above and beyond the minimum requirements of the subreddit, and more importantly, answers that allow us to properly evaluate your abilties. Many flair applications will include answers which are only a paragraph or few sentences, which simply won't fly! To be sure, we understand that there are some questions which simply can't be expanded on that much, but unfortunately, no matter how correct your response might be, it just isn't a good candidate for a flair application, as it doesn't give us enough material to really evaluate your talents.

Links to 3-5 comments in /r/AskHistorians that show you meet the above requirements, and of which at least three were posted in the last six months.

These are technical requirements, but some people manage to fail here too. If you link less than 3 comments, you're going to get rejected! And the 3+ comments need to be proper answers, linking to one answer, and then two follow-ups in the same thread does show you're engaged, but it only counts as one. Likewise, make sure they are recent. If they are all year old answers, it will get rejected no matter how great they are. We expect flaired users to be active members of the community. On a similar note, even the most fantastic responses in another subreddit won't count, as we want to see that you are active here. To be sure, if you have the 3-5 recent comments in the sub, we welcome additional material - whether on reddit or elsewhere (Published a book? Tell us!) - as backup, but it is the material on AH that we are primarily evaluating.

The text of your flair and which category it belongs in (see the sidebar). Be as specific as possible as we prefer flair to reflect the exact area of your expertise as near as possible, but be aware there is a limit of 64 characters.

Specificity is good! Generally speaking, we aren't going to give out flair that is simply "America", or "Military History" (Don't worry, I tried too). We don't need you to narrow it down to insanely nuanced explanation, but do want to see it be reasonably constrained to what your flair application demonstrates. Additionally, if you are asking for flair in a topic, your answers should show it. Don't apply for flair "Ancient Greece" and all your answers are about 19th Century textile production. A few answers outside of the primary focus is fine, as it can help demonstrate your general skills, but the majority of your application should reflect your chosen field. We do allow split flair though, but each piece needs to have its supporting "documentation", no taking your word for it. You are more then welcome to apply to have it expanded at a later time once you have those answers though.

Expected Behavior: We do take into account an applicant's user history reddit-wide when reviewing an application, and will reject applicants whose post history demonstrate bigotry, racism, or sexism. Such behavior is not tolerated in /r/askhistorians, and we do not tolerate it from our panelists in any capacity.

The final factor is not about your credentials, or your ability to answer questions, but about behavior. As noted in the application thread, we do look through applicant's user histories and take them into account. To be sure, we aren't talking about any old behavior which won't fly in /r/AskHistorians. You don't need to be super serious and cite everything you post everywhere. Likewise we don't care about the vast majority of opinions a user might hold which a mod might disagree with. It doesn't matter to us if you are a Republican or Democrat, Baptist or Atheist, Playstation or XBox. The mod team, and the larger sub community is diverse and runs the gamut. Rather, we are specifically concerned with extremist views of hate or intolerance. These are things we would ban instantly for if they were posted in the subreddit, and we won't flair a user who expresses such views, even if they keep those posts to other subreddits. We don't care which side of the "spectrum" it is, or whether it has nothing to do with your field of study. We will always be clear on the reason for rejection, and if you believe we misconstrued a post, you will have a chance to explain it, but we will not grant flair if we have concerns about the "moral fiber" of a user.

So now you're putting together the flair application. If you are still unsure on whether you will make the cut, there is no 'penalty' for getting rejected. Plenty of current flaired users didn't get it the first time. The important thing to keep in mind, if you believe you have what it takes, is to look at the experience positively. We will usually try to offer some criticism on where it fell short, and are happy to provide further expansion and advice upon request. And it isn't just the mod team who can help. Many flaired users are happy to give you advice if you reach out.

###I've Got the Chops, But I Can't Find Any Questions!

So you've read through all of this, and you're screaming "I KNOW THINGS!" in your head, but no one has ever asked a question about the life of beet farmers in 16th century Crimea. It can be rough when your field of knowledge is one that is rarely trafficked, but some of the best things I've read on this site are on topics I never knew I was interested in!

So with that in mind, there are a number of avenues available to you to be involved in the sub, strut your stuff, and get some nice, shiny Flair:

• Use IFTTT: Perhaps the questions you can answer are just not happening when you're online! Even if you camp the /new queue, it is easy to miss many of what gets posted, especially if it isn't upvoted to the top. Many of the flaired users use IFTTT.com to set up alerts for themselves. It runs periodic searches based on keywords you select, and can send them to your email when a question on a topic you like shows up.

• Our Weekly Threads: Wednesday is "What's New", Thursday is "Theory", and Saturday is "Sources". They happen every week like clockwork, and we are always happy to consider pieces written in those threads as part of a flair application, whether it is a book review on some obscure tome that you love, musings on a current historiographical debate, or explaining why some recent discovery is so important! The only caveat to keep in mind is that, since you have a lot of time to prepare a post in those threads, we can get especially nit-picky, so make sure your bringing your A-game!

• Rotating Theme Threads: Monday Methods and Tuesday Trivia, as well as the occasional Floating Feature, provide similar opportunities, but with a varied theme. The topics are usually kept quite broad, and often announced in advance, so can also offer great opportunities to tie in your own area of focus.

• Friday Free-for-All: Perhaps you just really want to write about something that doesn't fit any of those options. Well, we aren't opposed to seeing people post short essays in the Friday "Free-for-All" thread, which is the "anything goes" thread of the week. As before though, when you're posting something which you've had time to prepare in advance, make sure its top-notch for a flair app!

• Hint Hint, Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge: If you've got an answer you know you can write, and are in burning need for a question, come to modmail and chat with us. Many of us travel the obscure field road as well, so know the feeling (well, maybe not me...), and it has been known to happen that, after such conversations, oddly specific questions appear on the subreddit from time-to-time.

###I Have a Really Short Attention Span, Summary Please?

We don't care what degree you have, but instead that you are knowledgable and passionate about an historical topic. Participating in the subreddit and writing high quality answers is the way to demonstrate this, and once you have a few under your belt, we look forward to your Flair Application.

###That's All Folks!

So there you have it. Hopefully this has provided everyone with not only a bit more understanding of what we mean when we say "expert", but how to go down the road yourself, and how to eventually join the ranks of flaired users. If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate as this is the place for them!

Edit: Minor Cleanups

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today we're talking about the world's most influential technology, which you are using right this hot second... no not the Internet, it's written language! So please share any trivia you'd like about any form of written language. (Non-human languages also welcome!)

Next week on Tuesday Trivia: Breakups!! We'll be talking about splits between people (or groups of people), acrimonious or harmonious to your pleasure, romantic splits, or more esoteric ones like countries, businesses, etc.

Reaches into the cookie jar for the next one, sadly comes up empty... Oh no, the jar of trivia treats, she has run out! :( Please sent me any prompts you'd like to see!

• Where do you go as a starting point when you want to learn about a new subject?
• What are some resources to find material on what the average person's day was like? Similar to this video
• How can I use resources like libraries to my advantage?

Any other insights are appreciated!