I'm a big fan of Lincoln, and living in Central IL provides tons of little pieces of history regarding him. There is (was) a tree in my town, The Lincoln Oak, which was a tree that Lincoln and Douglas used to debate under, before the famous Lincoln/Douglas Debates. The original tree died and was cut down 1976, and they replanted a new "Lincoln Oak" a few years later.

Anyways, this old man in my office noticed my Lincoln decor around my cube, and brought me in a section of the original Lincoln Oak that he cut from the tree when it died. It's not really that cool, but I like it quite a bit. Here is a picture of it if you've, well, never seen a piece of wood.

I want to thank all the active members of this sub for making it a nice, sane, civil, true liberal and true rational place. With Islamophobia and right wing hatred bubbling up everywhere I see and gaining mainstream acceptance, even from people who are smart, civil and progressive on so many things- I enter into a sort of misanthropic outrage and hopeless despair. This sub is my ticket out of it. So thank you, everyone.

I've kinda dropped off the face of the /r/AskHistorians earth over the past month. Sorry about that. It's been busy. I finished my masters dissertation, got engaged, and moved to another continent. Trying to get back in the swing of things now!

Hi and thanks for the thread.

What was the basic outline of zulu history from Dingane usurping Shaka to Cetshwayo losing to the British? Where can I read about this period?

I ask because I have a few books on the formation of the Zulu and Shaka, one on Mzilikaze. And then I have a few on the Angol Zulu war. But nothing between. What was happening in Zululand in those years and in South Africa in general?

So I was going through some early Irish historical sources and noticed there's a lot of references to disease and plague. A LOT of them. So I figured it might be interesting to look at the original texts (I was skimming through translations) to see what kind of terminology the sources used when describing plague and disease, which could be a cool start for a research project. It seemed like a great way to jump into a project dealing with popular perceptions of plague during the early medieval period in Ireland.

However, when I actually looked through these sources, I found that almost every entry that relates something about plague is entirely in Latin! Little islands of Latin in a sea of Middle-Irish! In one Irish entry I found, the terminology used to describe plague seems to be a Gaelicisation of "mortalitas", which was super disappointing because it looked like a composite word meaning something like "flying death" if it was actually an indigenous term.

So I got super into this topic because the translations were pretty liberal with their use of 'plague' and its synonyms. I ended up discovering that entries dealing with disease are almost exclusively in the learned tongue and use maybe two words to indicate 'disease', or use appropriated terminology in vernacular, which is pretty interesting but wasn't really the angle that I wanted to approach this topic from. I guess the moral of this story is to never take your translations for granted. The fact that these sources vary in the language they use is something that the translation never acknowledges in-text, and could shed light on the priorities of ecclesiastical and secular cultures.

A few weeks back, one of my professors mentioned that if you want to have a reasonable expectation of keeping up with the amount of reading required by a graduate program, you need to be able to read a book in 3 hours. He described the process, among other things, as "swallowing without chewing."

A second professor, when informed of this, wondered "if we're not taking the time to read these books, then who is?"

So, I throw this out to you lot: Is there a better way to organize graduate work in history than we're doing now?

My computer is dead because the motherboard died and I can't afford a new laptop because I don't have money. /student-problems

Fortunately, I have file backups (so I still have my JSTOR article downloads somewhere, yay), but this also means it's harder for me to answer questions (let alone do my history assignments) because it's taking me longer to type them out and I have to work with less immediate sources. Plus I can't download articles on my mobile devices. /AskHistorians-specific-problems

Might buy another thumb drive so that I can store files on the go. Download lots of articles and put them in my bag, can't lose that, hah.

How do you guys save articles so that you can read them in future, especially in the case of disaster like this? And what is the lifespan of digital files over physical books?

I've been focused on World War I for some time now, reading a huge thick book on it. But I've only made it halfway through and had to stop due to just...depression. It's so horrible. The sheer numbers of men who seem to be dying for no reason other than greed! "We want this land! Go fight and die so we can have it!" Please tell me that I was reading too fast and there are moral reasons for this war that I've missed, or that come up later.

Edit: I do know that there was genocide going on in some of these countries, but the genocide doesn't seem to have anything to do with the reasons for fighting.

Has anyone here read The Graves of Tarim? A friend of mine suggested I read it and I'm wondering if I should buy it or not.

I am a author. I took a whole manuscript about cooking, transcribed the calligraphy, annotated the words or concepts that have fallen out of modern use, and redacted the recipes and wrote those out in modern cookbook format. I am looking at my next project soon as that one is at the publishers.

What are some courses or books I can read to turn my experimental projects into more historian mind set?

I'm an undergraduate poli-sci and history student. Last semester one of my research papers was selected for publication and it finished the final stage of review and editing today, so it's full steam ahead for publication! It may just be a minor undergraduate research journal but I'm pretty excited about the whole thing. I figured this would be a good place to mention it; when I've mentioned it elsewhere I feel a bit too pretentious.

So uh ... it must be midterms time everywhere, huh? Or was there some sort of atomic bomb doc or something that came out?

I actually have something to post in this thread this week, and it's not my usual schtick. I've just started my music history course, finally, and will be starting with Vivaldi and Handel. Though there's not really a lot of history required in the end (apparently we're only getting tested on terms and knowledge of a handful of pieces?), I'm supposed to be reading some short biographies. Anyone got a short, non-Wikipedia bio for Vivaldi? Preferably online because, uh, I procrastinated and now I need to have read it for tomorrow.

What do people here think of this article/review on Snyder's Bloodlands?

was listening to a lecture about political theory and it mentioned machiavelli's line on fortune about how fortune is like a woman and if you want to master her you have to beat and strike her. i'm new to history and all this stuff but machiavelli is looked at as a great thinker of the past right? this is one of those "it was a different time" things i guess but are there any other quotes from people who we look at as great thinkers of the past that would raise a few eyebrows?

So I handed in an assignment the other day that is the first part of completing my MA thesis. It was an outline for a literary review of sources that we will likely consult for the thesis. We had to give a brief description of what we wanted to write about (it didn't have to be too specific, as it's going to be approved/declined by the prof first), and about 10 sources.

I have an idea of what to write about, in a very broad sense: the ethnic relationship in post-Soviet Georgia, primarily its effect on the 2008 war (my program, European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, is rather inter-disciplinary, but I wanted something more contemporary). However to narrow that down a bit proved a challenge, more than I thought. I considered many different views on how to approach the topic, never fully certain I liked any of them. Sources were not an issue, as I easily found some that could be utilised in a variety of means.

Finally the night before I write up something, but wasn't too pleased with it: arguing that the conflict has been framed as a Russo-Georgian affair and the views of the local minorities have been subjugated. It's not a bad topic, and one that I could pursue. But the next day, I immediately woke up and regretted it. I realised it was not what I wanted to do, and instead thought of a totally new approach: framing the war, and earlier conflicts, not as a ethnic conflict but a political one. Luckily this is only an outline we handed it, and I'm fairly certain, or should I say hope, that I can present this new idea to my advisor and go with that.

I'm headed off to Sitka today for the 147th anniversary celebration of Alaska Day, the state holiday that commemorates the handover of Alaska from Russian to American authority.

Has anyone else here read Iain Pears, author of Instance of the Fingerpost and Dream of Scipio? I love him for those two books.

The first is a four-part book telling the story of the same incident from the perspective of four equally unreliable narrators. It's fascinating. It's also set in Oxford after the Restoration, and features English Civil War conspiracies, codebreaking, and quirky Venetian doctors.

Dream, though, is my favorite. It follows the writing and rediscovery of a (fictional) Neoplatonic text. The story is told through the perspective of three men living in Provence during three different crises: a Roman aristocrat in recently post-Roman Gaul (who writes the text), a poet/Papal politico in the Avignon Papacy (who re-discovers it), and a graduate student in the Holocaust (who finally realizes its significance).

Check it out. If you've read it I'm curious for your opinions.