Am I the only historian who is annoyed by the whole Paleo Diet thing and its alleged ties to history? /rant

I kind of want to go over the word "tribe", which I feel has perhaps been dismissed too quickly here. I admit the absurdity of a word that refers to both the Zulu empire and small hunter gatherer bands of Khoisan, but it seems that a past misapplication of a term is not necessarily a reason to dismiss it, and in fact can be a positive attribute in its favor.

At least in the societies I study, the word "tribe" generally refers to an ill defined socio-political grouping, either joined by personal and kinship ties or justified by them, dependent more on personal quality than institutionalized titulature for leadership, and existing above, beneath and parallel to other political structures (such as family groupings, defined states, or ethnic units). It seems to me that this is both a set of relations that is usefully described, as well as being poorly represented by other terms (such as ethnicity, ethnos, nation, clan, etc). And best of all, its bundle of associations means that someone using it is forced to be very careful in defining and demarcating their terms--I think the usefulness of inadequate terms in this regard is often undervalued.

This is striking me because I am going through Smith's Roman Palmyra, where he describes Palmyra as an essentially "tribal" society and then spends about twenty pages describing what he means. The term itself seems to have no better replacement, and the need to carefully contextualize it created a very useful demarcation of meanings.

Now that we are several days removed from the 4/1/2014 shenanigans, I wondered if anyone learned something new/interesting while researching their silliness that they wanted to share.

For example, I learned more about the Nage mythology of the Ebu gogo, and followed a bit of a rabbit trail when looking at the linguistic attempts to tie those stories to a real small-bodied hominin that inhabited Flores until ~18,000 years ago (H. floresiensis). I then scared myself a bit late one night when I tried to imagine encountering a hobbit in the middle of the Indonesian jungle.

Have you ever been driven by a vague sense of moral outrage?

I've gotten myself into a proper rabbit hole involving mass/pauper's graves on commercial property in my city. I'll update you all in a few days when I've conducted the interviews I've set up for the weekend, but in a nutshell:

There was a long neglected cemetery with private plots, and a large mass grave (about 125 people) that contains the last victims of the Halifax Explosion that were found after all the other burial sites were deemed 'full'.

The developer of an apartment building was given permission to build on the site, dug up actual bones, someone bought a few plots in a nearby cemetery, and that's the end of it.

There's a really lame memorial plaque in the corner of the lot but no one seems to know if that's where the grave actually is. No one. NO ONE, has kept track of this.

So, I'm spending all of my free time trying to figure this out.

Has that ever happened to any one else? I keep wondering why I'm doing this. The development is about 4 years old. I don't want it to come down...but c'mon - this whole affair stinks to high heaven.

I figure I'll use the free-for-all this week, in light of some very successful April Fools posts, to plug /r/ancientgliders . /u/gingerkid1234 has already posted a summary of Jewish gliders and a brief aerodynamic run through, and I'll be giving a brief summary of Chinese livestock kites by the end of the day, with some CAD work (2D...but maybe even a 3D model sometime in the future if I can work in the time). Questions about all ancient gliders are welcome!

I am looking for a good book on the history of chemical weapons, anyone have a recommendation? It can either be solely focused on WWI or be more comprehensive.

Anyone here have advice on personal databases for research? I currently have a goddawful spreadsheet of biographical information + references to around 90 castrati, and we all know using Excel as a poor man's database is bad news bears, so I want to migrate it to a proper database. I have moderate amounts of experience in MySQL databases, so I can sit down and make a proper database from scratch but I am pretty lazy and I just want a plug and play software option if such a thing exists. I also have access to MS Access and was playing around with modifying the Address book template to my needs, but then I just felt sad about myself, so I stopped.

Anyway. Big amount of biographical information on a spreadsheet, quickly growing unwieldy, heaping shame upon my ancestors for not being a database. How can I organize it?

As some of you may know, I'm an engineering student IRL, and I'm taking a course on nuclear reactor design. We just did criticality calculations on early experimental nuclear reactors. It's really cool to see the physics behind historical scientific things.

Also, question for those who do inquisition records: I heard a great story about one villager who was able ton escape his charge because he could name something like 150 people who had reason to hate him, and 40 of those named were actually his accusers. Is anyone familiar with this anecdote?

Any historians of education out there? Great post with digital research tips for history grad students from this year's American Educational Research Association conference.

Do any historical political boundary databases exist?

What year was the bloodiest during the troubles (up until 1994 obviusly).

Are there any good books about mesoamerica that aren't on the book list? I'm looking at getting 1491, but are there any other books I should consider for getting an understanding of what the political picture looked like?

Who is the most underrated U.S. President? There's a great quora thread on this but I'd like to hear some more opinons.

How much could $20 buy in 1791?

I was reading the seventh amendment to US constitution:

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Any of you maritime historians out there have a list of some good, recent historiography concerning Caribbean Piracy?

Is there a good aggregate source for the production, imports and exports of countries (or regions) throughout history (as in, "around 1920, 70% of all jobs in Nusquamistan were in growing kumquats, three quarters of which were exported")?

Been spending the last week on Strauss and Howe - their writings and also thefourthturning forums posts. Focusing on generational cohorts with characteristic temperaments makes for a fascinating way to storytell, interpret the past, and make sense of the present, even though, like most broad-sweep cyclical theories, it has shortcomings and imprecisions that push it into non-falsifiability. The basic concept of using human lifetimes to delineate eras makes for a strong framing regardless of the details.