This week in mod news: /u/AnOldHope is back from his moderating sabbatical! Hip hip hooray! :)

My hardcopy parchment, and highly European book contract arrived today. So it is official! Now to get back to revision...

[edit: added a possessive and conjunction for clarity]

How are you supposed to say a monarch's name when their regnal number is in the middle, like John III Sobieski or Karl XVI Gustav? Is it "Karl the Sixteenth, Gustav?"

I'm curious about what everyone thinks about the recent controversy over The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger. Briefly, conservative religious groups in India used a law against insulting or inciting hatred against religious groups to get her book banned, and her publisher has agreed to destroy all copies in India. Here's an article about it.

For anyone who works on religious history topics, does this make you a bit concerned? Doniger is an established academic, so I doubt this would hurt her career very much, but for a new academic, it may be hard to find a publisher willing to take on any book that could be controversial. I'd also be worried about continuing access to sources in a country if my book were to prove controversial. I had one professor whose work resulted in librarians in her country of study not being very cooperative with her since they disagreed with her conclusions. I can only imagine what would happen if your work became so controversial that the publisher withdrew it. You may have a hard time even being allowed back in the country.

Had a rough time researching yesterday. I'm reading a report from the early 1900s on "racial degeneration," but it's really a kind of survey of slum living conditions. The stuff on children's diets got to me. Here's a sample.

“Child fifteen months cannot walk, was brought up on the bottle which it left off at twelve months; now it has breakfast, bread and butter and tea; dinner, potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, etc.; tea, bread and butter and tea; supper, bread and butter and a ‘sup’ of milk. Slices of bread and butter in between meals whenever it wants it. Appearance pale and flabby, there is another child eight weeks old having the bread. They rarely go out.”

“Emma D., aged three years, small, enlarged joints, knock-kneed. An illegitimate child whose mother goes out cleaning, has never had breast or bottle, was reared from the beginning on ‘pobs’ (bread boiled in water) and a little milk added, has had no milk since twelve months old, now lives on bread and butter and tea, with ‘whatever is going’ for dinner. Is eating all day pieces of bread and butter.”

These are from the 1904 Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Degeneration, here. I'm usually a cold, emotionless, cerebral reader of the past, but kids going hungry makes me sad.

Just another slow day in the library. Suddenly: Soon.

Do historians invest all their career to a single topic - let's say the history of Britain, or do you switch depending of your interest at the time?

The question got deleted because I think it was too broad? Sorry about that. :(

Anyways. I wanted to know if other cultures had a version of ritual suicide that the Japanese are known for.

This isn't a joke or anything but I just want to thank you all for letting me be part of this community of historians. I like having the opportunity to learn more history and share the knowledge about the ancient world I have studied so much at college. For Sparta!!

I'm in my first year of undergrad, and I was wondering what are things I can do now to make myself a better historian. For example, is there any reading that I should look into or know by now, or are there any experiences I should look into? Thanks ahead of time, and I also want to say how much I enjoy this sub. It truly is my favorite.

How did the wealthy and powerful House of Este lose control of the city of Ferrara to the Papacy in 1597?

The other day I was eating noodles. As I was eating them I realized that I knew nothing about them. Can someone inform me about the history of the noodle?

So a bit of an odd note, but the wikipedia articles for Greek Old Comedy and Aristophanes's corpus are superb. It is so good that I think it must have been a university level class project--or is completely plagiarized.

/r/linguistics had a thread about anachronistic use of language in TV shows. Here's the one that kicked off the discussion, on the TV show "Masters of Sex". This one is about Mad Men, and this one is about the phenomenon in general. Of course, here is a relevant xkcd.

I just saw the billboard for the sequel to the movie "300," with the caption, "Athens Will Burn." I read up on Wikipedia about the entirety of the Greco-Persian Wars. My question is, did Alexander's conquest of the Persian empire have anything to do with these conflicts, i.e., was it "revenge," or had so much time passed that Alexander's war was essentially a new conquest?

I am in the last year of undergrad and one of my history professors approached asking if I was interested in going to grad school (which I am). He then told me to check out the new Early American Studies program which he is the director stating that I would be a good fit.

So my question is have any of you gone this route? What's the difference between a traditional masters in History and one in Early American Studies? (Obviously I am going to ask him about it but just wanted to know your experiences)

There's a common (at least to me) scene in some black and white romance movies of a man trailing a woman endlessly as she tells him to leave her alone, to which he replies "I won't leave you alone until you marry me" as if this STALKING is romantic. Was it? How did permanent (ie marriage) courtship differ between now and back then?

What is the oldest known work of satire?

hey, does anyone know where I can find a map or information regarding early fishing settlements in New France? I'm looking for some maps for historical geography purposes and I do not know where to find resources

Has there been a period when men plucked out their beards?

What empire, at its height, was the most powerful? The criteria used is completely open.

I love you, History. KISS ME