It will be Prof. Hope come the fall semester. Those poor students :(

For a long time I wondered when a castration fetishist would find me and attempt to make contact, because it was only a matter of time. Well, that date was April 11th, 2014. And it was on Goodreads.

This week I also found something I wrote for work (under my real name) for the official archives blog cited on Wikipedia, which was very flattering but also kinda funny. I mean, my blog posts do cite our archival materials (that's kinda the point of doing them, to show the depth of our collection), but it's still, yanno, a blog post. Next time someone says "what's the issue with using Wikipedia for AskHistorians answers?" I will say "My blog posts are cited on it, that's what's wrong with it."

Anyway April's off to funny start for me.

Lately I've been hooked on researching a Victorian tabloid newspaper called the Illustrated Police News. I was originally attracted to its sensationalised coverage of gruesome murders and rampaging animals, but of late I've been drawn to some of its more sexually risqué features. We don't normally associate the Victorians with open displays of sexuality, but by the 1890s this paper was packed with half-naked pin-up girls, saucy stories, and adverts for condoms and pornography!

I'm currently writing a series of blog posts comparing it to modern-day lad's mags. Part one is online now, with more to follow shortly. I posted this in /r/History a few days ago, but I'd be interested to hear what you all make of it.

Nineteenth-Century Nuts: The Anatomy of a Victorian Lad’s Mag

I visited the PhD program I'll be attending in the fall and had a great talk with my potential adviser. I'm in an interdisciplinary program, but my research interests are substantively historical; she gave me a great idea for a way to focus my thesis topic! I haven't been able to let go of it since. My interest is in the treatment of femininity by queer women from the birth of second-wave feminism onward, and she suggested looking at personal ads from gay newspapers, magazines, and (much later) websites as a way to start gauging the shifting mores. As depressing as r/gradschool is, I couldn't be more excited to start!

I expected a deluge of Passover questions this week. Sadly they've all been on the exodus, not the holiday itself.

So I'll start! I was wondering this year about the egg on the Seder plate. It's definitely a late addition, since it isn't mentioned in the liturgy at all. But why? I've heard a few explanations that seem dodgy. Is it, like Easter eggs, a borrowing from other springtime festivals?

And that can be extended to other Passover stuff. When did Charoset get added? It's not in the liturgy either, at least not directly (it's eaten with the bitter herb). Dipping vegetables is older (though not in the oldest level), it's in the liturgy, but is the reason for it explicit? What's the deal with the specific vegetables, parsley or (less commonly and more recently) potato?

Anyone got good reading on it? I can't exactly flip through the Talmud for info, though I should do some googling for textual references.

I posted this in /r/badhistory but thought it might deserve a mention here:

So I meant to mention this in yesterday's AskHistorians thread, but good news for history! The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute has been involved in a court battle lasting over a decade against a group of survivors of a terrorist attack in Jerusalem who were attempting to seize Iranian assets as compensation. The assets in question were tablets from the Persepolis Fortification Archives, an incredibly important resource for the study of the administration of the Persian Empire. The archive was taken to Chicago in the 1930s, and although Iran is recognized as the proper owner, they have come to a very reasonable arrangement in which the OI, one of the few institutions capable of doing the tablets justice, essentially gets to keep them as long as is necessary to do the proper research. The lawsuit carried the very real risk of monetizing these artifacts, which is something that must always be avoided, and of politicizing them and sending the message to states with political tensions that Western institutions cannot be trusted.

Fortunately, a US District judge has found on appeal for the OI, allowing them to keep the tablets. The battle still isn't done yet, but this makes it ever less likely that the tablets will be seized.

I'm curious, as a historian, what is your pet peeves? Issues that will make you rant for days and months, even if may seems very minor to non-historians?

I finally was able to contribute with something after oh 1 year in this sub! I was so exicted to be able to use my knowledge! http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/236fyq/in_postwwii_italy_did_members_of_the_italian/cgtzg1b

Hello,

I am looking for someone (historian/economic) for a school task Ive written on for a year. The topic is the way to the great depression, and it needs to involve a "personal" part. This is where I would like to have someone to implement an interview. If this person does not wish to be named, he can also remain incognito, but I need to be able to verify that she has a degree in economics/history for authenticity purposes.

I speak English, German, French and Luxembourgish, (even though I am pretty sure that wont help too much) but as the task is in German I would rather have the interview in English/German.

Thank you for your attention! If you are willed to be the person I am looking for, please write a reply here or send me a private message.

Have a nice day

I heard the marching song of the British grenadiers again recently, and was somewhat surprised by the erudition of the references--sure there is hercules, but how many infantry men would know who Lysander was? Or would talking about ancient military heroes be part of the culture? How would these classical references resonate?

So apparently my incredibly vague "uh here's roughly what my thesis is about, but without actually telling you anything about it" 100 word abstract was enough to get a paper accepted into the Australian Historical Association conference this July.

Now to work out what I can actually say in 20 minutes.

I'm writing an assignment on the social importance of Roman baths at the moment and it's absolutely fascinating! You've got Seneca whinging about how everyone wears too much perfume now, inscriptions mentioning slaves with management positions at the baths, Pliny the Younger bragging about how his private baths face on to the sea, and Martial making all his filthy jokes about the people he socialises with there.

My particular favourite so far is Epigram 2.42 "Zoilus, you spoil the bathtub washing your arse. To make it filthier, Zoilus, stick your head in it." There's also references to 'irrumated water' in my course material translations, which is intriguingly off-putting...

When did European compasses stop using Latin for cardinal directions? One of the things that was given to me when my Grandmother passed away is a compass whose cardinal directions are marked as SE (septentriones - north), OR (oriens - east), ME (meridies - south), and OC (occidens - west). I was hoping that could help me date it.

As I'm sure everyone is aware next year celebrates the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.:

The aim of The Magna Carta Project is to translate both the 1215 and 1225 editions of The Magna Carta from the original Latin into modern English. Expert commentary will be written to guide a range of audiences through the material, in order to make it accessible and useful to researchers, school students and the general public. The material produced during the course of the project will be made available on this website. The project is due for completion in time for the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta in June of 2015.

I thought I'd share the excellent Magna Carta blog - usually written by Sophie Ambler which also includes 'features of the month', reviews, and a podcast featuring Nicholas Vincent and David Carpenter among others.

On a similar note Richard Cassidy is writing a weekly blog of the events of 1264 and the build up to Simon de Montfort's baronial movement.

What is your favourite Horrible Histories sketch from the BBC?

Well, I'm quite familiar with the standards here but as I am soon going to graduate with a history degree and teach high school history, are there any specific things some of you higher up academics would like to see corrected at the high school level? I make an effort to emphasize source analysis and to dispel many historical myths in my class during student teaching like the flat earth/Columbus stories but is there anything else I should focus on?

During last weeks FF thread, I discussed how John Houbolt was responsible for the lunar orbit rendezvous mode that the US eventually used in their Apollo mission. I just read on /r/space that he passed away today. RIP to one of the most important, yet under-appreciated engineers at early NASA!

I got reading about conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy, born in the US in the Victorian Era and was wondering about their birth. Their mother seems to have lived, meaning she either somehow did so vaginally (I honestly can't imagine) or did so by Cesaerean section. Given these girls were born into slavery, it seems unlikely their mother would have had access to a C-section. Does anyone know about the births of these girls or other historical conjoined twins (like Cheng and Eng)? What was the prognosis of Ceseareans then, if indeed they were performed?

To what extent did American corporations drive the Cold War? I always thought that Soviet expansionism was mostly an effort to "save Europe" from Western freed, that corporate interests caused the US government to be involved in numerous wars and coups. But recently I've come to believe that this might not be completely true?

So my next AMA on the eastern front of ww2 is now officially scheduled for the 6th of July and I'm very much looking forward to it.

I've also begun the arduous task of converting my library into ebooks, it's hard as hell to try and find obscure ebooks.

I usally travel a lot, and i haven't found a good way to save reddit pages, anyone got a good app that lets me do this easiliy? Like a addon for reddit is fun or baconreader perhaps or really anything from firefox/chrome. I used to be able to do it on my old galaxy s2 but alas my new xperia z1 hasn't this functionality. I know about offline reader but it doesn't work for me.