So, a small question that has puzzled me for a while is: Why is Auschwitz the most famous of the Holocaust camps?

I feel that it is something I should have learned during my studies, but I can't recall ever hearing a reason for it. Just the constant mentioning of that (those) particular camps. Is it because it was the first camp reached by the Sovietians in 1945 or is it because Anne Frank was there? Or is there some other reason altogether?

I probably should've posted this in the theory thread yesterday, but I've been thinking about writing and history. Specifically about writing well and history. My university still focussed heavily on academic writing, but I noticed that a few professors were moving away from this towards a more loose approach to writing history. This meant using a writing style which would not have been considered acceptable to those that still preferred an academic style - there are less rules, more room for literary flourishes, more room for beauty.

I can see the benefits of both styles, really. Academic writing leaves less room for ambiguity. It fits into the idea that to have a professional methodology, you need a professional writing style. And maybe most of all: it's easy to master.

On the other hand, I find that the power of a well written - or even beautiful - text is far greater than that of an academic text. I think that it could also make history more accessible. And, well, I think striving for beauty even within history is a worthy ambition.

I've read a bunch of academic texts - by students, professors, famous historians - and I often think to myself that they could've been so much better if they were just written a bit better. I even came across texts that were so poorly written I barely understood what they tried to say.

So what I'm asking is: should we, as historians, attach more importance to writing well? For instance, should universities add writing courses to their history curriculum?

Unusually, I actually had a chance this week to do some reading and so started on a book about disability in the 18th century (just can't get out of the 18th century). It was really interesting on a lot of levels, but one little factlet surprised me: The note that the sixpense coin was more likely than other coins to be crooked, like in the nursery rhyme.

There was a crooked man

Who walked a crooked mile

He found a crooked sixpense

Beside a crooked stile.

I'd always figured "sixpense" to be chosen for the rhythm or at random, but this little throwaway line in a book suggests that it may have been chosen because crooked sixpenses were actually a common thing. So now I really want to know why the sixpense was commonly crooked. Anyone know?

Some vague notes on mid 20th century American gay literature and the strange dearth of reprints in e-formats

About a month back I read Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps by Michael Bronski (2003), which was a selection of American gay literature of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. The introduction to the book is really a great stand-alone essay actually, and I’d totally recommend picking up the book just to read that, but the author observes most of this literature is extremely hard to find and read. He relied extensively on the generosity of people with private collections and specialty non-circulating academic libraries to do his research.

So I set out on a minor challenge to see what exactly from the author’s basic bibliography of gay lit from his period I could and could not find. So far I’ve been doing pretty well. Although overall copies in WorldCat are very low, my library (which I’ll admit is an unusually world-class research library) owns quite a few of these books, and still lets most of them circulate bizarrely enough. I most recently read a re-bound first edition of Song of the Loon by Richard Amory (which was really something else, a totally insane combo of noble-savage racism and badly written sex scenes), and amusingly enough one book I wanted is available on Hathitrust due to accidentally not renewing copyright I believe, so everyone is welcome to read it. The only one I really want and haven’t been able to get easily is A Different Drum by Chris Davidson (which is a romance set in the Civil War, dang that sounds interesting.)

So, okay, you might think these are all rare pulp books that no one gives a hoot about, but there’s really a decent amount of interest in these books. Some of them go for $40-50 a pop on ebay and specialty book websites. So why exactly aren’t they being re-released in ebook? The barrier to entry for ebooks is seemingly so low.

Well, it’s a complicated issue effecting essentially all mid-century printed material I learned. Add to this that these particular mid-century gay lit books were often written by people using false names and published by fly-by-night publishing houses working under the censorship radar that are long dissolved, making their copyright holders pretty much untraceable, and you’ve got yourself almost an entire genre of literature considered “orphaned works.” So basically no massive reprint of 50s-60s gay lit ebooks unless we have major copyright reform.

Fun question for you guys! What is the most historically accurate film you have seen? We've all seen films that get many things right, but always something that bothers you, even down to small details. Is there a film that got everything right?

So just curious, but how historians actually cites artifacts in their researches? Is there some sort of a catalog can contains the exact name of each archaeological findings, such as all the pieces of Tang Dynasty porcelains?

I'm used to citing original research papers for my research (material science related), but citing primary sources in historical researches sounds quite different to me.

I'm not sure if this is new-post-worthy, so I'll give it a try here. Have there been any successful, completely self-sufficient (i.e. little to zero exports and imports) cities/city-states/nations with a large population (>1,000 people) in the post-Medieval world?

Two things inspired this question: The first was all those apocalypse or post-apoc movies and videogames out there (not to mention ptentially real life) containing large settlements and, in some cases, entire nations out of the remaining dregs of humanity, from Woodbury, GA to the New California Republic, and me wondering how sustainable those sorts of mini-societies would be. The second came in the form of a CGP Grey video I recently came across, where he asserted that the only way a country could be self-sufficient in this manner is to "resort to a medieval level of technology." Now, I understand that it would be nigh impossible to create and maintain modern technology in a non-globalized world, but I doubted that technology would need to roll all the way back to "Medieval" levels. Is there any basis to this?

I'm an avid reader of this subreddit, and I really love learning more about history. One book that really impressed me was "The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road" by the venerable historian Geoffrey "Noel" Parker. I particularly enjoyed how he was able to use historical archives and provide a quantitative analysis to arguably old data, and really explain how Spanish investment (and frequent failures) evolved over time.

Of course, I also love the Minard illustration of "Napoleon's March to Moscow", even if that work is very limited in scope.

Can the experts here give me further recommendations of good reads that use methods of quantitative analysis to shed light on an old subject? I'm on a Mediterranean kick right now (in the period between Spanish Reconquesta and the dying days of the Ottoman Empire), but I have been thinking that if such methods were applied to the early parts of the European conquest of the East Indies, that will be great, too.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: grammar, clarity.

I am helping to start a secular homeschool co-op and we would like to teach history with a lot of hands-on activities.

We are going to split kids into a couple of groups (K-8ish and 9ish-13). I am interested in activities for both sets, but especially for the older group.

Price ranges for stuff should top out at $10 per kid if it is an activity where each kid makes his own thing (but less that that would be better). If it is a group project then $25-50 would be best, but we could do some that are more than that ($100).

I have a few board game suggestions from r/boardgames, but am willing to take more suggestions if you have them.

Thanks!

I've been putting the final touches on our "Deindustrialization and Its Aftermath: Class, Culture and Resistance" conference here at Concordia University in Montreal. The conference starts next week, and the organization has been a roller-coaster! Between "missing" funding applications, technological miscommunications, and even one presenter who will be unavailable due to an arrest for social activism - let's just say it's been an educational process. All of these things have since resolved themselves, though, and so we are just about ready to host more than 100 attendees from more than 6 countries. I thought I'd include our conference information here, just in case any Redditors around Montreal are interested in attending some of our sessions.

Deindustrialization and Its Aftermath is a four-day interdisciplinary conference co-organized by the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia University and the Scottish Oral History Centre at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. The conference will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines as well as artists, musicians, poets, digital practitioners, film-makers, community-based projects, and others who are engaging with deindustrialization, its aftermath, and working-class resistance. Its guiding principle is the study of cultural, political, and socio-economic effects of deindustrialization.

The programme features 20 sessions that engage with wide-ranging issues relating to the experiences of deindustrialization, such as representation, local resistance and impact, to name a few examples. The final day of the conference, 4 May, will be dedicated to two round-table sessions exploring the interpretive and political value of deindustrialization as a concept and, in the second instance, the meaning of working-class in a post-industrial era. Our final program can be found online at our conference website: http://storytelling.concordia.ca/deindustrialization/program/download-schedule

If anybody is interested in attending, just shoot me a message on my Reddit account or email me via the contact information on our conference website. Enjoy!

I am toying with an idea of looking at Roman Greece, at least during the Late Republic, through the lens of "culture death", comparing to regions such as Chechnya, where brutal suppression, or Republican China, where national humiliation and political disintegration, shattered social bonds and lead to rises in crime, as well as certain demographic effects. Doe anyone know any good descriptions of this issue?

As a side note, I recently read a mention in a book discussing slavery in the Roman Empire, saying it was so widespread even the very poor could own one. The evidence brought forward was a defense speech for two barristers who were described as impoverished, yet owning a couple slaves. Facepalm.

Is it true that the bloodline in families living in Romania have closer ties to ancient Rome than families currently living in Italy? I heard this years ago and it doesn't seem like something that would be true.

In the US, what were the most significant union-busting events that took place in the mid to late 20th century (Reagan era especially)?

Hello AskHistorians contributors!

Can you recommend a book/reference on how the Silk Road was formed?

Or to be more precise, how commodities that are considered nearly worthless on one end of it can be considered priceless on the other end?

Nutmeg and pepper were priceless in Europe, but they were just everyday item in southeast Asia. How did the traders and the many middlemen know that they could profit from such items? I imagine it took centuries to discover the potential of trade of any item across such a vast distance, and if I understand correctly, many middlemen.

Thanks in advance!

How historically accurate is the history channel series Vikings?

About slavery and Christianity:

People often comment that anti-abolition people would argue that slavery was supported "by the good book".

However, it seems to me rather unlikely big money people would bring the Bible to arguments spontaneously. Seems much more like a reaction, because the demographic of the militant abolitionists was crowded with religious people, who used religious arguments in their case against slavery.

Doing a modern paralel, I think it would be unaccurate to say the Bible was an inspiration to legalize gay marriage. However, due to people using the Bible against gay marriage, many LGBT supporters used biblical arguments for gay marriage as a reaction.

Maybe I'm having this impression because it seems to me the wealthiest slave traders were never very religious people. Being religious is rare among rich merchants even today, and 19th century literature makes it seem to me this was the trend then too.

Am I'm tripping balls here?

if we can recognize that our education system is based on conditioning children to work all day, why haven't we addressed the problem of adults being at work all day? what is more important than reducing the amount of hours humans spend working? what precedent dictates that each man must make his own living?

Why did Franco never ally with Hitler and Mussolini, considering that they had common enemies and a similar ideology?

I've just started Stephanie McCurry's Masters of Small Worlds. It's pretty magical so far.

1-Thanks for this subredit. I have never posted here before, but I love to read the threads.

2-Does history show that generally when a populace is disarmed by its rulers/government it will end up abused by it eventually?

I have two slightly related questions.

I'm reading Dan Jones' book The Plantagenets and while I find it an engaging read I wonder what historians of English history might have to say about it. I'm new to the subject. I've been studying British history for about a year now as a hobby, but there is so much! My entire undergraduate degree centered around the founding and creation of the United States and constitution, which was about a thirty year span to study, but most "popular non-fiction" about the subject drives me nuts because of the glossing over details and oversimplification. I imagine for British history it is much the same way, but with sparser record keeping.

Also I want to know a good book that chronicles Anglo-Saxon England.

Are their any good historical periodicals (newspapers/magazines) that are online in a decent format? I started reading Punch magazine on Gutenberg, but as its mostly satire its hard to understand without knowing what they're satirizing, and i'd really like to read more. They have some newspapers but they're all just a few issues here and there, and its a lot to sift through.

Has anyone found anything like this in their reading/research?

When did they start to establish country lines in human history, and what were some of the first defined countries. Sorry if this is weirdly worded question

Hi, a view days back ago I asked a question that was rather inappropriate for the context of the thread discussion, and was told to ask here every Friday (sorry about that). It is here

I just wanted to repeat my question: is there any way you suggest for me to improve an answer? I want to learn how write more academically, as this skill isn't taught at my high school. I have never taken writing seriously until last year when I was doing Revolutions as a school subject, so it is definitely not as top notch when compared to what others write in response. I am eager to improve, however.

Would you suggest anything (grammar, prose, expression, explanation etc..) to improve on the answer?

There's obviously faults in it, so what are the problems would my answer have that would confuse you guys and girls?

Writing has never been my forte, but I've been thinking that if I consumed people's brains I could maybe get their powers or something. My brother says otherwise.

Thank you.