You're not a fledgling. You need to eat more than vomit alone.

And yet, when we consult secondary sources and nothing else, that's exactly what we're doing. We're not consuming raw material -- we're consuming something that's already been digested by another mind. There's nothing wrong with that, but as Matthew 4:4 says, you have to have variety in your diet. You sometimes have to go to the source of knowledge. It's a necessary part of learning. There's plenty of undiscovered or unexplored history out there, and you shouldn't be afraid to consult primary sources yourself, even if you're not a professional historian.

Three months ago, /u/Elemno_P asked a question: How did the police spend their time before the War on Drugs?

I came up with a decent answer, but I struggled in places because no one has yet written about the topic. I had to rely on lectures and secondhand information. I don't like doing that when there's an alternative. In this case, the alternative was the logs of the Juneau Police Department.

At /u/mrsmeeseeks urging, I went to the Alaska State Archives and took pictures of about 18 months' worth of records: Between 1953 and 1955. Want to know what police work was like in small-town Alaska during this period? Here's your raw material, the greens behind your salad, the ground beef before your burger.

It isn't always easy to access the archives, whether in Alaska or the one down the street. Hours are limited, staff time nonexistent, and you might be hard-pressed to get a helping hand. But farming isn't easy either, and you need to grow food to eat.

Don't feel intimidated by the process, and don't be afraid to just go and visit.

Not everyone is a chef, though. From time to time, /r/askhistorians gets questions from folks who want to help on historical projects but don't know how. They have the time to volunteer and help, but they don't know what to do.

The easiest way to help is to simply walk through the doors of your local museum or archives and ask to volunteer. There are more museums in the United States than there are McDonalds and Starbucks combined and I imagine almost all of them have space for an eager volunteer.

Don't want to go outside? Fine. The Internet has made it possible to contribute to crowdsourced projects around the world:

• Micropasts.org is a central hub for contributing to different projects.

• Shakespeare's World asks people to transcribe the handwriting of Shakespeare's contemporaries, making their notes searchable. Sometimes, you'll run across words that have never before appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary.

• The World Memory Project is a collaboration with the U.S. Holocaust Museum to transcribe documents related to the Holocaust.

• The New York Public Library is asking for the public's help transcribing its massive collection of historic restaurant menus.

• You could help transcribe the papers of Jeremy Bentham.

• The Ancient Lives project asks volunteers to help transcribe the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection -- you don't even need to know Greek!

• The Art21 project is attempting to subtitle YouTube video documentaries about famous artists and artwork.

• The Tate Collection is asking for help transcribing the hidden notes of artists.

• The U.S. Holocaust Museum is asking for help finding out what happened to the children of the Lodz Ghetto.

• The Veridian newspaper project needs help crowdsourcing corrections of newspapers scanned with OCR. (thanks /u/caffarelli for the mention!)

You see, rather than just reading and mentally digesting the already-written words of others, you have an opportunity to contribute in a big way. With every word you transcribe, with every hour you spend volunteering at a museum or archive, you're doing your part to preserve and record history. You're making sure it lasts and engraving your life deep into the fabric of the world. Your contribution might very well last longer than you will, living on and inspiring researchers, historians and others who haven't even been born. It's said that a person lives as long as their name is still remembered. Not all of us will be an Alexander, but we can still do our part to leave the world a better place than when we arrived.

What projects do you know of that our users can help with?

I would like to start a sort of book club on AskHistorians, but not focus on books. Our recommendations of books are put into our Books and Resources list which anyone is free to look at, peruse, and read at their discretion. Instead, I would like to turn our focus on journal articles or book chapters from edited volumes. These are the sorts of resources that academics rely on, but sources in which we don't put into our list above. Articles and book chapters are advantages because they focus on aspects of research and topics of discussion that may not always be included or discusses in a book by a single or group of authors. These works may be dry, they may be technical, and they may just have a lot of jargon, but I feel like our community would still be able to come together and read one of these pieces, and have an intelligent discussion. AskHistorians users were invited this past year to the American Historical Association conference because of our methods to bridge the gap between academia and the public. So let's take this one step further. Let's try and attempt to broaden our horizons and knowledge about topics we might not normally seek out and read ourselves. Let's do this together.

This book club would work on a month long rotation. The first week, a topic will be posted calling for submissions. Anyone can submit an article or book chapter, but there are requirements. Said submission must be available online and open to anyone. The easiest way to do that, I've found, is by searching Google Scholar. Often, but not always, there are links to academic institutions or places like researchgate.net in which these articles and book chapters are free to read. See this example. When you make a submission, you must provide the title, authors, journal (if applicable) and date. Your basic citation format, essentially. But you must also provide the link to the work and either the abstract of the article or a summary (that you may have to write) of the work if it lacks an abstract.

Submissions need not be limited to just articles/chapters from history journals or edited volumes. As AskHistorians embraces multiple fields in order to understand the past, so shall the book club. Feel free to submit things from anthropology (archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, bio anthropology), art history, medical journals, etc. As long as it pertains to history it is open to for reading. There is also no time depth requirement on submissions. You don't need to submit something that came out in the last few years. If you've found something from the 1800s and think people will be interested in reading it, perhaps for the information or perhaps to discuss how dated the ideas are, feel free to submit that, too. Over the course of a week, the submission topic will be open to voting. At the end of that week, the submission with the highest amount of votes will be the chosen work to be read.

Some of my fellow flaired users raised concerns that we might fall into a rotation of the same topics or time periods and never move on to lesser talked about topics. For now, I say let the market decide on what we read. If it does become a problem, we could always implement a system in which once an article/chapter that covers one of our flaired areas gets read, we no longer will take submissions from that area until the rest of the flaired areas are covered. But that is an option for a later time depending on our initial success. Thoughts and feedback are particularly welcome on this area, as is the rest of the proposal.

Once we have our article/chapter to read, we have two weeks to read it ourselves. At the end of those two weeks a topic will be made for people to focus their discussion. Try to include what you liked about the article/chapter, what you didn't like, what you didn't understand, what you want to know more about, what were the problems in the methodology or premise, etc. As I said, this is a way to broaden our knowledge and an attempt to fill in some of those gaps we may be interested in filling. Hopefully we have a few flaired users around who can help to answer questions and point towards sources of further reading for those that are interested.

The discussion topic will be open for a week and following that week will be a new submissions topic. Hopefully with many new, exciting, and different submissions than the previous week.

Hopefully with this month long rotation there is enough time for people to read and participate. I understand our daily lives get in the way sometimes and we can't always make time for things like this if we had a much shorter time frame.

Comments below have wondered if we could use a shorter format. I proposed this:

We certainly could shorten it from a month to two weeks. For example,

Sunday: submission topic

Wednesday: announcement topic

2nd Wednesday: discussion topic

2nd Sunday: new submission topic

This gives people a week, including the weekend, to read the article/chapter as well as the following weekend to think of and search for new articles/chapters to submit.

Please, provide your input on this idea because ultimately this is for you rather than just me or my fellow flaired users. I want a system that works for you, that gets you interested in reading more, and wanting to come back for more information or to ask us questions.

I started looking up the "f*cked up" conflicts and got into Bosnian War. I know some Arabic so I looked up some raw videos from the 95's and found out that some people had blue thing on their heads (I.e. http://prntscr.com/bfry8a). I assume it's Friend or Foe identification but not sure which side or brigade is it used by. Thank you for taking time to read this.

After reading this comment by /u/commiespaceinvader that touches on the importance of Austria-Hungary's relationship with the South Slavs towards Nazi positions, I'd also be interested in seeing how this development and manifestation of Nazi ideology against the South Slavs contrasted against their view and treatment of non-Slavic peoples, such as the Hungarians, Romanians, Greeks and Albanians.

Tl;Dr: What did the Nazis think of Yugoslavs and Bulgarians, and how did this shape Nazi policy?