There was an interesting article in Slate called Snapshots in History yesterday all about how low quality and ahistorical the "history pics" accounts are on Twitter, or as they bombastically say, "Wildly popular accounts like @HistoryInPics are bad for history, bad for Twitter, and bad for you."

I've spent the last few months exploring the strange world of the Illustrated Police News - a 19th century, weekly newspaper that featured a delightful mix of crime, sensation, celebrity, sport, and sex. I've been gradually tweeting some of the funniest and most peculiar stuff, but I recently gathered it all together into a gallery on my website. Enjoy!

http://www.digitalvictorianist.com/tit-bits/

I posted some raw (albeit annotated) footage of the bombing of Nagasaki in /r/videos yesterday and was impressed by the turn-out.

This is my favorite story about the Barnacle Goose, from Gerald of Wales:

"There are here many birds that are called “Barnacles” [barnacoe] which in a wonderful way Nature unnaturally produces; they are like wild geese but smaller. For they are born at first like pieces of gum on logs of timber washed by the waves. Then enclosed in shells of a free form they hang by their beaks as if from the moss clinging to the wood and so at length in process of time obtaining a sure covering of feathers, they either dive off into the waters or fly away into free air. . . I have myself seen many times with my own eyes more than a thousand minute corpuscles of this kind of bird hanging to one log on the shore of the sea, enclosed in shells and already formed. . . . Wherefore in certain parts of Ireland bishops and religious men in times of fast are used to eat these birds as not flesh nor being born of the flesh. . .

Be wise at length, wretched Jew, be wise even though late. The first Generation of man from dust without male or female [Adam] and the second from the male without the female [Eve] thou darest not deny in veneration of thy law. The third alone from male and female, because it is usual, thou approvest and affirmest with thy hard beard. But the fourth, in which alone is salvation, from female without male, that with obstinate malice thou detestest to thy own destruction.

Blush, wretch, blush, and at least turn to nature, She is an argument for the faith and for our conviction procreates and produces every day animals without either male or female."

Original Source HERE

TL;DR Jesus is for real because geese come from trees.

I just finished Soldiers: German POWs on Fighting, Killing, and Dying by Sönke Nietzel and Herald Welzer. This book examines clandestine recordings of German POWs in the UK and US, and I will be posting my brief review tomorrow, but I thought you folks might enjoy a bit of humor found in the book.

"What is the difference between Christ and Hitler? With Christ one died for all." (Laughter.)

--Lieutenant General Friedrich von Broich, July 1943.

Realizing I'm fed up with my job, and qualified for mad amounts of student aid, I'm seriously chewing on just enrolling in college and getting a BA in US history. What are some of the more marketable focuses? BTW, almost anything after about WWII bores me to tears and I really dig post civil war, through WWI.

The other week I signed up for bookmooch.com, which is an international multi-language site for people to swap books in exchange for points that can either be spent on books or donated to a cause. I've seen a few academic journals on there, and so far a representative of a foriegn University contacted me to ask for a text book I listed.

Being an archivist holds a certain glamour for people I have come to realize. So, for those who want a peek behind the magic curtain what's doing in the archives today:

• I am watermarking images, making metadata sheets for them, and putting them online using this software platform

• A guy who I think is from the preservation department is looking at our vinyl records of old local radio broadcasts, he and another archivist keep reading off the more amusing titles

• On Wednesday an entire cabinet of mysterious microfilm was left like a baby on our doorstep, today an undergrad worker is grinding through it on our microfilm reader, which is old, hand-cranked, and squeaks a lot

• A squirrel got through the guard into one of our window wells and we were going to call facilities to come rescue it, but it got out on its own, huzzah!

Hey guys, quick question. Where are the best places in Italy to see Roman sites? What are the best Roman museums, and where are they? I want to see as much as I can!

Meetings between famous historical figures are something of a quiet passion of mine, and I always like to collect examples of them when I can.

The Royal Welch Fusiliers provide a good venue for this sort of thing, as they were the home of numerous major British poets and memoirists of the First World War -- including Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and David Jones, among others.

I was intrigued to discover yesterday that Sassoon and Jones, in spite of being contemporaries, never met during the war. In fact, they met only once -- in 1964. They exchanged much happy conversation about their poetry and reminiscences about the men they had known during the course of the conflict, and were able to more or less determine that they had almost met, once; Jones' company appears to have relieved Sassoon's one day in 1916 at Mametz Wood.

Many of the other poets and memoirists of the war were on good terms with each other, and at least frequent correspondents -- the "trinity" of Graves, Sassoon and Owen is often noted, for example, being broken only by the latter's death in 1918. It was odd to me to think that two such accomplished authors, writing of their experiences in the same regiment in the same war in much the same parts of France and Belgium, and having gained so much notoriety and success afterwards for their writings -- anyway, it was odd to me that they should only ever have cause to meet in person fifty years after the fact, and some thirty years after their respective books had been established as the classics they remain.

This one's for the Roman historians. I made a post about this topic a while back, but it didn't receive as much information as I hoped for so I will throw it back out there to see if anyone else has some more to add.

If anyone knows of books, articles, or other sources that explain the origins of, specifically the Roman Triarii, I would greatly appreciate any information. I'm interested in how they got their role as the 'third line of defense,' how they got their name, etc. Do we know when they were first used in Roman military doctrine? Were the Triarii an Etruscan tradition, or perhaps derivative from a different Italian city-state? Also what type of privileges did the Triarii receive in relation to other soldiers? Were they exempt from the more frustrating tasks the rest of the army was subject too?

Not really sure if this is covered by AskHistorians, but I can't think of a better subreddit.

I roleplay as the Ottoman Empire in a political roleplay. It started in 1900, and it is now 1915. The timeline has remained more or less the same as the OTL (minor differences; the Russians won the Russo-Japanese War, Denmark got invaded by Germany, Russia, and the UK, stuff like that) and this includes the start of World War One in 1914.

I tried to keep the OE neutral, but it wasn't to be and recently I declared war on Russia. Currently I am only at war with Russia and Armenia, although I will most likely end up facing France in the near future. Britain seems determined to remain aloof from any events on the continent, so fingers crossed it stays that way.

I've closed the Straits, and I plan on going on the offensive up through the Caucasus'. Now my question is; is there anything I should be wary about? Any mistakes or pitfalls that the real OE made that I should avoid?

Also, assuming this war goes well, is there any way of saving the Ottoman Empire? Or by the 1900's was the Porte doomed to die?

What were typical insults for medieval and renaissance era Britain?

I've always loved comedy in a myriad of forms. Recently I've been going back and watching the earliest of recorded versions of standup and sketch comedy. This has got me wondering who the funniest people in history were? What books/plays/letters should I be reading to understand what the Greeks, Qing Dynasty Chinese, Meiji era Japanese, the Gauls or anyone else found funny?

I've read some Voltaire, I've seen bits about a crude Roman poet whose name I can't remember, and I'm aware that Aristophanes is a must see on this adventure.

I want to see what has changed over time, what's cultural, and what stays the same. I've been dying to ask this question for a few days now, but it's way too vague to open a new thread for it so I've been patiently waiting for Friday Free-for-all. Help me AskHistorians, you're my only hope!

Something I don't quite grasp about the strategy both sides employ during the Greco Persian wars. Just why was it so important for the fleets to be close to their respective armies? What would these fleets be able to do to affect the battle on land?

Can anyone recommend a good introduction to East Asian philosophical traditions for someone who does not speak Chinese at all?

I keep asking this question but it never receives any attention whatsoever.

When is the best time to post a question on /r/AskHistorians?

So I arrived in Georgia (the country, not the state) early in the morning on the 7th, and am spending the next 6 months here teaching English as part of a semi-voluntary program set up by their government. Spending the next week or so in Tbilisi, the capital, before I get sent out to some random village. Never been to this part of the world, but am looking forward to it. And I have to say, though it is quite evidently poor here, Tbilisi looks like quite a great city, with lots of historical churches and the like.