Sorry for my more-or-less absence the past few months. I've been working full time and teaching an online class, so my free time was basically nil. However, I officially started my PhD program at Temple University yesterday, so I should be getting back into the swing of all matters historical.

I've just been faced with one of those situations where personal histories become intertwined with academic interests!

After pouring through personnel records of the Sydney Steel Plant in Nova Scotia, which is the subject of my dissertation, I came across a number of time cards detailing my wife's grandfather's entire time working at the plant. I know that her family will be very happy to be able to see this information about their father's work life, especially since he has since passed on a few years ago. It also gives me pause to think about the historian's role in mediating the past and our ability to maintain distance from the subject under examination. Food for thought.

Ever have one of those persistent pieces of a historical narrative that get repeated and repeated and sometimes repeated a little differently and nobody ever checks up to figure out what actually happened? I would say that I hate them but really I love them, because they give me so many blogging opportunities.

As everyone who has studied the atomic bomb knows, the original target for the second bomb was Kokura, not Nagasaki. Upon arriving at Kokura, the strike plane found it obscured by clouds and/or smoke, and so went to Nagasaki, the secondary target.

Different sources give different reasons for why Kokura was obscured, since just an hour or so before, a weather plane had radioed that it was a clear target. I discuss the two most common theories, along with a third, less-common one, on my blog today. I conclude, unhelpfully, that we don't really know and probably won't ever know, but still, it's a fun exercise.

Thinking of writing a book.

At least from my posts in this sub I'll have plenty of writing to draw from :D.

Made Honors List for this last quarter. I'm reasonably pleased.

So, here at my university classes start Monday. I'm teaching as usual this semester (not a history topic, but web development). For those of us in the education field, when do your classes start? What are you teaching, and how excited are you about it?

Started writing on the book about Native North American history after contact again. I'm trying to finish as much as possible before classes start in a few weeks.

Seems like a constant fight to balance my default state (incapacitating perfectionism) with what I know I need to do (just get something on paper, edit later). My two feline co-authors provide a welcome distraction when needed.

What helps you get in the history writing zone?

Coffee? Alcohol? Inspiring music? A writing hat? Panic induced by impending deadlines?

How do you all take notes when reading texts? Recently, I've found myself typing large quoted passages, but this takes an inordinate amount of time. What tips/ideas do you all have to make note taking faster?

a while back I posted about finishing my GCSE history paper, and yesterday I found out I got an A* on it, which I'm very happy with. Also found out I will have the same excellent teacher for history and gov.pol at A-level.

I've recently been looking into a lot of comparative history and man I am jealous of anyone who works in the past five hundred years. I suppose the excitement of looking at tax documents lessens after you see enough of them, but still. I can only take comfort in knowing at least I am not chained to paper.

The first round of galleys went back to my press on Wednesday. 1400 marks on 423 pages. At least it looks like the announced date (November) will still hold--keep the fingers crossed!

Kind of a meta question, but is it alright to ask open ended questions about the quality of an essay? Foreign affairs just ran a series of articles on the US's Cold War involvement in Iran, Congo, Chile, and Bangladesh which were very interesting but I can't evaluate the historic claims made by them. I was hoping to get AskHistorians' opinion of them, but wasn't sure if it was appropriate.

So last weekend I read a lovely text--Elliot Oring's Israeli Humor: The Content & Structure of the Chizbat of the Palmach. Some background to go into the text--the Palmach was a wing of the Haganah, the largest Jewish paramilitary in mandatory Palestine. While conceived as an elite force in the Haganah, because of the situation it ended up being the closest thing to a regular military in the Haganah. They were interesting in all sorts of ways, but one in particular was their institution of chizbat. This is a loanword from Palestinian Arabic meaning "lies". Essentially, chizbat were sessions where groups of Palmach soldiers would gather and "perform"--tell anecdotes, jokes (more on that later), and tall tales.

The content of these is a bit hard to discern exactly. The issue is that our records of chizbat are either written (a very different medium from the original, which is oral) or are orally told to an outsider years after the fact. Written chizbat tend to have a punchline, which the oral forms do not. This is perhaps because the audience is outside the original context. In their original form, most of the audience would’ve been assumed to have already heard the narrative. The point was the telling, not disseminating the information within. Oral forms recorded tend to have some explanatory material that may’ve not been included in the original. For both of these, the surviving forms are almost certainly greatly shortened in length. Very few are more than a minute in reading, but sources speak of most narratives going on for up to an hour. There are several that show evidence of summarization, and those who were a part of the chizbat speak of the narratives being freely added to or summarized, so surviving forms are likely the shortest versions. Many are really just one-liners—it’s possible they were once part of a larger narrative. Originals seem to have employed hand gestures as part of the telling, which has been lost today.

So, what would these include? They’re a genre I’m not sure how to classify. They’re entertaining stories. Many are joke-like, though they don’t fit conventional understandings of a joke (which the book talks about at length). They resemble folktales, but the characters involved are both real and were probably known to the audience. Some are jokes. The real characters serve as stock figures, whose personalities, known to the audience, would make a narrative be humerous. Many rely on stereotypes that are obscure today, or require the cultural context of Mandatory Palestine to make sense. The language of these was Hebrew, but many of them assume a competency in Arabic and a great deal of familiarity with Yiddish. They would never focus on an individual who had been killed—they only were about living characters.

I’ll give some examples, and explain them after.

Moishe Berkovich returned home from reconnaissance of the police station at Givat Olgah and gave a report: “Two guards patrol constantly by the gate. We can take care of them easily. Two are on the tower, by the projector [?]. They will be neutral. But they have a dog—terrifying!

Of course, to modern readers this doesn’t make much sense. but there was an old stereotype of Eiropean Jews being afraid of dogs—I’ve seen this exact joke repeated with a WW2 soldier in American contexts. It has a punchline and is very short, uncharacteristic of what was probably the actual original content. This will probably only make sense to some of our Jewish readers:

A jecke [another spelling of yekke] is in Jerusalem and he sees an Arab porter moving furniture from one place to another. And he sees this porter with a huge grandfather clock on his back, yelling “dahrak! Dahrak!” [Arabic: “back, back”, i.e. “stand aside”]. The jecke goes up to him and says “excuse me sir [points at wristwatch], but don’t you think one of these is more practical?”

A yekke is a German Jew. In Jewish circles, the yekkish stereotype is not unlike the german stereotype in the US in part—they’re punctual and efficient. But in this context, the stereotype goes beyond that. They’re cultured, and they know it. As a consequence, they have difficulty understanding the world outside Germany. In this case, the yekke fails to grasp that the streets in Jerusalem are suited best to moving things using porters. Unfamiliar with this, he assumes the clock is for timekeeping.

Another, more obscure:

On Sabbath afternoons, the mayor of tiberias goes out, generally in the accompaniment of his wife, and strolls pleasantly in the streets. Once he passed the house of Ofer and saw Mr. and Mrs. Beber (Ofer’s parents) sitting on the porch. ”shalom, mr. beber”, said the mayor. ”Shalom, honorable mayor”, said ofer’s father. ”May we come in a bit?” asked the mayor. ”Please, please” said ofer’s parents. They brought chairs out on the porch and put on the table a bowl full of fruit: peaches, grapes, melon, watermelon, and also a few apples. The mayor took two grapes and his wife took a peach. They ate slowly, but by their looks did not appear to be satisfied. Finally, the mayor could not restrain himself and asked, “tell me, Mr. Beber. Do you have any fruit in the house?” ”All the fruit is in front of you”, said Ofer’s father. ”Isn’t their even a small cucumber?”, asked the mayor.

That doesn’t make much of any sense for a layman. But there’s humor in that Ofer’s parents are European, while the mayor is middle eastern. The semantics of “fruit” are different, and for the mayor cucumbers are a food given to guests, whereas for Ofer’s parents the fruit fulfills the same function. Note that the ethnicities of the characters involved are assumed to be known to the audience. Some, like this one, rely on early Israeli sayings:

After the conquest of Eilat, Ben-Gurion arrived in the Aravah and surveyed the area. In every fortification, they honored him with a parade, and he spoke to the soldiers. In one of the fortresses a platoon mustered for him, and Ben-Gurion, who stood on a small rise, began to prophesy: “do you see this wilderness? Here will be a forest!” One of the guys added: “yes, and bears will walk in it”.

This makes sense only if you know the expression “no bears and no forest”, which signifies that something will never happen. The soldier is adding a quip from a colloquialism which fits his impression of Ben-Gurion’s statement.

Another genre whose content is too long to transcribe, are retellings of practical jokes. Ofer was a particular joker in many of them. This is historically accurate—ofer was a real person who really liked playing practical jokes. Many characters’ real personalities figure in the stories told about them. Beni was a hard worker. Abu Layish is a bit of a simpleton. Nisan is a head-in-the-clouds intellectual. Zevkeh is guarded and emotionless. Avraham Shapira isn’t very good with Hebrew.
Others rely on social circumstances of the period. There’s a stereotype of Galileans being uncultured, and being amazed by rather pedestrian things. There’s funny story about a Palmachnik encountering a Galilean Jew and a Galilean Arab. Addressing the Jew in Hebrew, he asks for water. The Galilean Jew turns to his Arab neighbor and asks, “Muhammad, vos vogt er?” [Yiddish: Muhammad, what did he say?]. The social circumstance is that many Galilean Jews never were not integrated into the Hebrew-speaking jewish population, and many Arabs picked up some Yiddish and some Hebrew from the Jewish immigrants. Some stories rely on Palmah stereotypes—their slang, their mannerisms.

Anyway, it was an interesting read about an obscure cultural phenomenon I’d never even heard of. If you want to read a bunch of amusing anecdotes that won’t be amusing until you finish reading, I recommend it.

What do you think is the best thing to do when you see a top level post on the subreddit that you think might be lying about what one of its sources says? Obviously, if you have the time and access to the source, then you can just cite pages. Short of that, what can you do? Move on? downvote and move on? Luckily this doesn't happen often.

It was a convenient day to have this question, so here it goes!

Does fashion change more or less rapidly as history progresses?

For example, was there a more significant shift in fashion from 1 CE to 1,000 CE than there was from 1,001 CE to 2,000 CE? Or perhaps on a smaller scale of a hundred years, between 1800 and 1900 CE.

I'd prefer to have weight given to how marked the overall change is, and not just how frequently it changes. The transition from bell bottoms to acid wash jeans to cargo pants to skinny jeans would carry be considered less of a change than hypothetically jumping from togas to breeches, for example. Any backed opinions are welcome!

Also, last night, after the mods had gone to bed, /u/cephalopodie and /u/cordis_melum declared my little Trixie kitty to be the AH mascot. (I may have named them surrogate kitty aunts too...)

I might submit this as a standalone question, but I'm not sure if it would violate the twenty-year rule or if I'm thinking of it correctly. So, in the meantime...

What impact is the increasing use of digital media having on the study of history? Paper and parchment can survive for a long time, clay tablets can last thousands of years given the right circumstances, and physical artifacts can survive for quite a while as well. Digital media, on the other hand, seems like it could be more fragile. Tapes and disks may not survive as well or may be intentionally destroyed or overwritten. In addition, you need to have the correct equipment available to read digital media (consider the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project). Is this having an impact on historical research? Is it not that troublesome? Are people already perhaps working on ways to mitigate these issues?

Just got told my preliminary supervisor in advance of starting my MA. Looked up her CV, and am quite impressed; she's been a prof at the university for about 20 years now, and he main focus is Russia-EU relations, which is most likely what I will end up writing about. Of course I could change supervisors once I actually physically visit the university, but I'm liking where it is going now.

Would anyone have suggestions on good memoirs or biographies of great Western composers? A number of years ago I read the memoirs of Hector Berlioz on a friends' recommendation, and it was not only fascinating to delve into the life of a great composer, but the book itself is hilarious (Berlioz had a MASSIVE ego, a pretty severe persecution complex, and enough ridiculous misadventures to fill a young adult comedy movie). As a former orchestral musician in high school and college, I have mostly experienced composers through their works, but it would like a few more glimpses into who they were as people. I know there are a few historians of music on here, anyone have recommendations?

I've changed my Management minor to a History minor. I suppose it was only a matter of time.