With profound thanks to all the /r/askhistorians redditors who provided comments on excerpts over the past year and a half, I am pleased to announce that I have e-published my Introduction to Folklore with Kindle/Amazon. I have pegged the price at the lowest possible point that will allow for Kindle to distribute it as a new book. I am really grateful to all the great comments over past months, which has helped shape the text. Thanks to all.

I am happy to announce that mrsjschooltiger and I are expecting a boy, sometime around mid-January (we just found out the sex and that everything's going well during an ultrasound yesterday). I try really hard not to gender my expectations, but we were 100 percent sure it was a girl, and I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it!

If you are interested in the deep history of the Manhattan Project, or have friends, students, colleagues, etc., who are: Over the last year, the Department of Energy has been declassifying the previously secret volumes of the Manhattan District History, a secret history of the bomb commissioned by General Groves at the end of World War II for his own personal use in the postwar period. Because I'm feeling generous, I'm giving you a gift: I've put all of the +800 MB of PDFs in an easy-to-download place, with sortable file names, and full-text searchability. Enjoy!

This week I have:

• Moved to a new apartment.
• Submitted my fourth chapter.
• Submitted revisions on an article.
• All but finished the first submission draft of another article on another subject.
• Gotten through the first teaching of the term unscathed.

I write this short update from a desk in my new office, which is literally a repurposed closet. It's actually pretty sweet, all things considered, and there's some talk of putting a large wardrobe on casters over the doorway to simulate a secret room. Further bulletins as this bewildering fantasy develops.

Last week, I wrote up a post discussing an incident during the Great Leap Forward on /r/badhistory. As the post was asking to combine multiple bad historical claims into one post, I added a few lines to deliberately distort the truth, with the intention being "let's write up an account of the Xinyang Incident under the belief that the mistakes and the deaths were done by counterrevolutionary saboteurs and not party officials".

I showed a few early drafts as I was writing it to some friends and asked them to guess where I started making shit up. One of them guessed that I was making shit up when I described a struggle session against an accused "right deviationist". Another thought I was making up the statistic regarding how many people died in Xinyang Prefecture. When I told them that the only thing I did was imply that it was the fault of "counterrevolutionaries", they basically went "wait, what the flying fuck".

After posting it, I figured that I could go back and fix the deliberate bad history to make a post worthy of AskHistorians. As such, here's the actual history about this incident. For comparison, this is the original post that I posted to /r/badhistory with my distortions.

Yeah. This post? Actual history, without the distortions.

So, as everyone knows, the Great Leap Forward was more like a Great Stumble Forward (Into a Wall). From idealistic and utterly unrealistic production quotas to utterly useless steel and pig iron to arrogant officials to falsified data regarding crop yields to an ineffectual bureaucracy who tried to cover up starvation deaths, it was bad.

Known as the “three years of natural disaster” in mainland China for decades after the event, the Chinese government has refused to discuss this event. It’s getting better now, of course, but it’s still not there yet.

Anyways, I’m going to focus on an event that occurred from October 1959 to October 1960 in Xinyang Prefecture in Henan Provence, China: the Xinyang Incident.

Xinyang Prefecture was, as Yang Jisheng describes in his book Tombstone, “the economic engine of the province” (Yang, p. 23). Rooster Mountain, the scenic getaway for Communist Party members, is located there, and it was the main producer of grain and cotton as well as a supplier of “tea leaves, timber, bamboo, tung oil, and medicinal herbs”. Even so, between the years of 1959 to 1960, at least one million people (or 13.5% of the population at the time) perished to death from starvation.

It all started in 1958, when the Great Leap Forward was launched. With the “Pan, Yang, Wang” incident and the failure of the Hundred Flowers campaign fresh in their minds, an anti-rightest campaign was launched, in order to subdue what the Party considered counterrevolutionary elements. People were subjected to struggle sessions. One such incident is described as follows:

Following the provincial-level campaign against the “Pan, Yang, Wang” clique and the campaign against right deviation, Xinyang’s Guangshan County on November 11, 1959, conducted a criticism, or “struggle,” session against the secretary of the CCP country secretariat, Zhang Fuhong, who was labeled a “right deviationist” and a “degenerate element.” During the struggle session, county party secretary Ma Longshan took the lead by kicking Zhang, after which others set upon him with fists and feet. Other struggle sessions were conducted by country-level cadres on November 13 and 14, during which Zhang was beaten bloody, his hair ripped out in patches, and his uniform torn to shreds, leaving him barely able to walk.

On November 15, Zhang was handed over to commune cadres, by which time he could only lie on the floor while he was kicked and punched and had what remained of his hair torn out. Another struggle session by commune cadres on November 16 left Zhang near death; by the time he was dragged home that day, he had lost control of his bodily functions and could no longer eat or drink. On November 17 he was accused of malingering and attacked again. On November 18 he was accused of pining for the return of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek and was dragged from his bed for more struggle. When he asked for water, he was refused. Around noon on November 19, Zhang Fuhong died.

(Yang, pp. 24-25)

Struggle sessions like this one were not out of place. Party official Ma Longshan used Zhang as a scapegoat in order to deflect blame from himself for launching a pilot program to institute output quotas to save lives.

Because people who gave a conflicting opinion (i.e. were seen as deviating from the party line) were seen as right deviationists were subject to struggle, political pressure was on to ensure that they were not left in last place. As such, officials in Xinyang ramped up the estimates for production quotas, initially giving a projection of 15 billion kilos of crop, then lowering it to 7.5 billion and finally 3.6 billion kilos when called out on it by Zhang Shufan and others. Zhang Shufang, however, believed that the actual projection would be 1.5 to 2 billion kilos, and reported such at the Henan provisional party committee meeting. The provisional party leaders were dissatisfied and subjected numerous party officials with struggle; Zhang lost his official position due to trying to tell the truth.

Thanks to political pressure, these overinflated figures were reported and later used to procure absurdly large amounts of grain. To meet these inflated procurement quotas, every single grain was taken away, leaving almost nothing for the peasants to eat. When these quotas were not met, party officials would accuse the production teams of concealing grain and subject them to struggle. One could not win; trying to tell the truth would subject you to struggle, communications were monitored and censored to keep word of the famine from getting out, peasants were kept from running away and escaping the famine struck area. The only thing a peasant could do was sit there to await their death from starvation. Communal halls shut down from lack of food. Households were wiped out from unnatural deaths. Corpses were left unburied, as people were too weak to dig graves. People would begin to eat human flesh in desperation for food. Trees were stripped of bark, young shoots eaten before they grew seed, and wild herbs sought. And still, lower-level party officials would do nothing, out of fear that they would face repercussions for telling the truth and trying to get help for the starving peasants. In fact, they would cover up the deaths, underreporting the number of people dead by using a “seven ‘don’t includes’ and one ‘doesn’t count’” (Yang, p. 53) and subjecting those trying to tell the truth to struggle. Because of this, people at every level of government was complicit in these cover-ups.

But word did eventually get out, and some letters did eventually reach the Central Committee. During the Rooster Mountain Conference in July 1960, Wang Guohua spoke up to defend Zhang Shufan and Li Ruiying (Zhang’s wife, who, while on a mission to report on a pilot project at Rooster Mountain Commune, tried to relay the truth to Li Xuefeng, an official at the Party’s North China bureau and was subsequently labeled a right deviationist and silenced). At that point, there was no way you could cover up these deaths. Ma Longshan was subsequently arrested and sentenced to a suspended death sentence. The Central Committee was called in to investigate, and subsequently targeted grassroot cadres to take the blame. Some officials were arrested, jailed, made to attend special training classes, and later sent to the countryside to work for 50 yuan a month. Others were sent to group training classes.

This incident is, in fact, pretty damned terrible. However, Mao and the Party didn't learn from their mistakes here, and many more people would die of starvation by 1962, when the Great Leap Forward finally ended. It is estimated that over 30 million people died from the Great Chinese Famine, of which the Xinyang Incident was a part.

Well it’s September, so that means summer is totally over. Now who wants to hear about my summer project? Everyone, of course, yes.

At the end of May I decided I needed to organize all the different castrati I had in my reading notes into a database, because I had reached the point where I could not remember which f-ing “Porporino” some random primary source was talking about because there were at least three (times a million for other nicknames), so I needed to be able to search it quickly. Also my dearest secret long-term goal is to write a prosopography/dictionary of castrati, as no such thing exists. Then I got lazy and just made a spreadsheet and not a proper database. Then I started adding more a lot more fields. 3 months later I have assembled a terrifying collection of cells outlining the basic vitals (or estimated vitals) of all the castrati I have had opportunity to meet in my studies so far, which is over 300.

As I now have the only dataset on castrati I’ve ever heard about, I’ve also started testing out some of the “received wisdom” about the castrati to see if it holds up to my precious, laboriously-assembled data. Here are results thus far:

• Claim: The castrati phenomenon peaked in the 1730s and then had a slow decline.

Looks like this is not holding up so far. Shitty graph. The data show castration hit its stride maybe 1640, peaked about 1700, and then around 1760 we saw not a slow decline but just a plummet. Now I’m not sure to what extent my 300 boys are a random sample or exemplary of their whole group, but as I’ve gradually added to the spreadsheet this pattern is sticking pretty true. (Dates here are rounded to the decade so it’s a bit noisy, and for many castrati I had to estimate a birth year, which isn’t as hard as you’d think because their musical premiere is usually known and then you -16 and you’re good. The ends of the graph are noisy as the tail ends of the castrati phenomenon are actually very well researched, so I have more guys there than is properly random.)

• Claim: Castrati mostly came from poor areas, especially the south.

Now this has shocked the pants off me, but of the castrati whose birthplace I know (only about half of the 300 sadly), this is totally not holding true. Here’s an awesome heatmap I made. Hardly ANYONE from the south. I made reaction-gif-esqe faces at this. Some of the areas (like Rome and the Roman provinces) I can understand, but really, this pattern is pretty shocking. Perhaps my 150 mystery-men are all southerners, but I’m guessing not. Castrati were northerners.

Any other things you think I could play with on this data?

I'll be submitting my dissertation on Wednesday, and everything has fallen into place really nicely. I'm even ahead of schedule! That's a relief.

But that also means that I have to pack up and leave London. :( I'm moving out a week from today, and I'm completely bummed. It's been a great year, and I freaking love London. It'll be nice to be back home with my man, but I know I'm going to miss this.

Since graduating back in January, I have not had access to a university library, or their access to journals and newspaper archives. Well with classes starting yesterday for my MA, I finally have an account again, and promptly downloaded 10-15 relevant articles, only stopping because I had other things to do. Was a long time to go without having instant access to this stuff, and I will make sure I'm prepared for the next time, with ample articles saved.

Just want to throw out a great book for anyone interested in American politics and the shift of the 50's and 60's. It's called "The Liberal Hour" and it's a really really great read! You can find it on amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143115464/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1409933139&sr=8-1

Thank you all for providing feedback and helping me have a place to write about topics I've loved to learn about for so long.

All I have to say :).

Need a definition for a new reddit user. Keep seeing references on other sites to 'trolling'. What exactly is this? Figured I would ask here as I will get a reasonable answer and not some bs crap

Is there a book that's considered the 'definitive' history of post independence Peru? The wiki only has books about Colombia and Argentina.

By that I mean that the books my parents read in primary and secondary school seemed to aggrandize certain parts of history so it would be nice to read a book that gives a more level narrative of it's history.

Does anyone here have any favorite Christopher Columbus conspiracy theories?

I used to work on a replica of Christopher Columbus' Nina as a tour guide. One thing some friends and I liked to talk about after hours were some of the conspiracy theories behind Columbus. He already had a map, he knew exactly where the Caribbean was, etc.

Any reddit-historians on Twitter? I only really started to tweet in the last few weeks, so I'm not entirely sure how to use it effectively yet. Any tips from people more used to the wonderful world of social-networking?

Has anyone read The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy? Any thoughts on it?

It kind of felt like really bad history to me - a lot of revisionist hero worship and fabrication, with a bizarre, unsubstantiated freedom vs imperialism theme.

Anyone want to confirm my biases or tell me what an amateur I am? I'm not sure if I'm just chaffing under my pro-Roman perspective, or the book is really bogus.

What was the first year that historians began recording dates per our current numbering system? Did someone just decide "well, this is year 1250" one day" I guess is a simple way to say the same question.