I am on crossroads and am considering whether to choose a career in academic history. The field has plenty competition in my country, and the financial aspects of the job aren't very bright until a few more years. If people who are pursuing it as a career could share their valuable stories, I'd be able to make a more informed decision.

Meat was rationed until 1954. I understand it in continental Europe which was devastated by the war, but how did it take so long to restore food supply to Britain, after supplies from the US could now get through again?

Having read a lot of material on world war 1, there is almost always a point about it being a 20th century war fought like a 19th century war with a focus on mass infantry attacks. This makes me wonder: if I'm in charge of one of the armies on the western front in 1914, what are my options to do things differently? Where those commanders really that inept or was there simply no alternative way of fighting available given the lack of tanks and war planes?

Lurker and occasional questioner here. I’ve often seen questions of the form “why aren’t all questions here answered” to which the usual, understandable answer is that contributors are busy and less moderated history subreddits are options.

While I think r/AskHistory is slightly better than its reputation, the questions I have tend to be ones that it’s poorly equipped to handle, r/AskHistorians experts don’t have infinite time, so I search for articles. I know enough to search academic databases and generally read critically, but I don’t know how to appraise current historical scholarship beyond establishing that it actually is scholarship. How can I evaluate arguments in academic literature assuming they’re recent, peer-reviewed, not obvious junk, etc?

I realize that to an extent this is the work historians make a career of, but the defunding of the humanities in the US makes it unrealistic for me to either go to grad school or take post-BA college courses, and I’m trying to learn as best I can.

From what I understand, sixteenth and seventeenth-century European and colonial American soldiers generally wore cloth or leather hats, often tricorne or bicorne, but in the early-nineteenth century they switched to wearing shakos. What prompted this change? Was it practical or cultural in nature?

I remember reading this claim in an essay about Early Modern England (the author noted that the term mirror was usually reserved to denote a written instruction for good governance (A Mirror for Princes), as actual mirrors of the day were hazy and of poor quality. The book Millennium by Ian Mortimer makes the claim as well. Not to be tendentious, but this sounds like an exaggeration. Aren't self-portraits described in antiquity? Aren't there Ancient Greek popular novels told in the first person, not to mention diaries (Japanese pillow-books) and correspondence from long before the perfection of the mirror? Or is this somewhat of a Euro-centric perspective, given that individual identity is still composed from a variety of sources (one's family, relationships, belief system, personal politics, etc.) even by those in countries with "democratic, individualist" values? Could the preoccupation with personal appearance/self presentation have just as much to do with the growth of a merchant class with disposable income concerned with social mobility as with the invention of a working mirror? Any resources on this topic would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! (:

Wanting a good book on the wild west and how it developed and ended.

As an amateur student of history, something I’ve discovered is that claims like “OUR ENEMIES LITERALLY BURN BABIES ALIVE AND WORSHIP SATAN” are usually not true, or at least based on heavy exaggeration or cultural misunderstanding. How common was infant sacrifice in the Levant during this period?

I’ve marked NSFW just to be safe since infant death is a pretty horrible subject

So I'm currently reading "A Royal Game" by the Austrian author Stefan Zweig. One of its main characters is imprisoned by the Nazi regime and makes a quick passing reference on concentration camps where "prisoners are physically and psychologically tortured" (he was not imprisoned there and it's not what the story is about, but that's besides the point).

Now, Zweig died by his own hand in 1942, years before the war would end. This novella was published around a year before his suicide in Brasil, far away from home. I could imagine that his correspondence with people in Europe allowed him to know about the camps, and even that seems strange to me (wasn't most of Europe occupied by the Nazis by this point, so it would be heavily censored if it existed at all? His homeland at the very least?).

Even though this might have been a misunderstanding on my part I was under the impression that the average person didn't know about the concentration camps. They did know about the persecution and execution of jews and other minorities, but I didn't know they knew about the camps, I assumed they were top secret (the Allied Soliders who reached the camps where surprised and disturbed to discover them, weren't they?). Even though governments could know about it, there is no reason to believe the average person would know about it, especially not when they're so far away and disconnected from the on-going war in Europe.

So how could he know about it? Did people know about concentration camps?

It is a cold day today and I stopped to kiss my wife, receiving a static shock as I touched her. Made me wonder what people thought that was before we knew about electricity. It there mention of the phenomenon in historic literature?

In some accounts of certain epidemics, the usual symptoms are mentioned : fever, chills, coughing and so on (but nothing about sores or pustules). But these accounts often talk about a stench associated with the disease : a fetid sweating, or just a general foul smell about the sick person. We have Covid and flus today but stench is not associated with those diseases unless personal hygiene is a question. The epidemics I am referring to did not involve symptoms that often involve stench, such as open sores or pustules. So what accounts for this stench that accounts from the 1800s often mention? Besides personal hygiene issues, what other explanation is there?

The ancient Greeks seem to have been up in the air about whether the Macedonians were really "Greek" or not. And although the Ptolemies originated in Macedonia, they seem to have favored Greek culture and Greek settlers while also picking up Egyptian religious and cultural traditions. Would ancient Greeks who interacted with the Ptolemaic dynasty thought of them as Greeks, Macedonians, or Egyptians? Would the Ptolemies thought of themselves as Greeks or Macedonians?

For the purposes of this “challenge,” when I’m transported back I somehow gain the knowledge necessary to be a soldier, and I don’t have to attend training. I’m also thrust immediately into a direct combat role. There’s no chance I somehow get lucky in a rear support role.

Possible, but not necessary follow up. While I don’t get to choose the exact role, is there a specific role I’m hoping for, such as artillery? Is there any role I’m scared of, such as cavalry? My first instinct is that being on an artillery crew would be relatively safer, especially during the Napoleonic Wars where to my understanding counter-battery fire wasn’t preferred to just pounding the enemy infantry. On the other hand, being a member of the cavalry in the Franco-Prussian sounds particularly terrifying especially as a cuirassier, charging at infantry firing back at me with long-range, accurate, bolt action rifles.

My inspiration for this post came from reading some online articles on Napoleonic casualties, one of which claimed of the 2.8 million French soldiers who fought in the wars, up to 1.4 million were killed in action, which is a staggering 50%. Reading some online articles on WW1, the fatality rates seem to be as low as possibly 10%. To me this makes the Napoleonic Wars seems much more to be the meat grinder that WW1 is often depicted as. Then I threw in the Franco-Prussian War to see how that may have compared as a decent “halfway point” in terms of both time and also technological development.

Also, I've read that these first arrivals left remains that appear somewhat different than later arrivals. Were they from Europe rather than Asia? Did they have more neanderthal blood?

Nowadays I would imagine that most bodyguards are privately contracted through security firms and the like (and for the actual President, the Secret Service). But I'm wondering what it was like for presidential candidates in the 1920s and 1930s. Did the government provide them? The police? Private companies?

The reason I'm curious about this is that we have a family story that my great-great-grandfather was one of Al Smith's bodyguards during his presidential campaign in 1928. He was a retired cop but appears on the 1920 and 1930 censuses as "special agent", so we have no idea if that's a government job or a private contracting thing. My g-g-grandfather was probably involved with Tammany Hall - could that have been how someone like Smith sourced their bodyguards? The bodyguards were apparently especially necessary when Smith was campaigning in places with strong KKK presence since he was a Catholic. I don't know how important bodyguards were to other presidential candidates at the time. And would Smith being a former governor affect where his bodyguards were staffed from?

Thanks!

I reckon they hated and persecuted political dissidents, specially communists and socialists, so why would they choose that as their party’s name?