I enjoyed an exceedingly rare instance of a thread in this sub appearing in /r/subredditdrama this week, after Tim ONeill and Charles Freeman got into a bit of a slapfight in this thread. I applaud the mods for choosing to leave the posts up rather than delete them (which I think they usually would if not for who was involved here).

The whole episode is just embarrassing for everyone involved - I hope everyone who is or is considering actually pursuing a career in history takes a minute to look at this thread and use it as an example of how not to conduct yourself if you want people to take you seriously. No serious, reputable scholar would get into a slapfight on reddit about their own book (at least not one that's this personal), cite amazon reviews as evidence that a book is good (or bad), or generally conduct themselves like this. It's funny, but also kind of pathetic and sad...

Edit: NB I linked that as a np link since I don't see much point in anyone reviving the "debate" those two were having, or scolding them further. I think /u/Daeres said everything there is to say about this very well. If anyone wants to weigh in here, though, I'd love to know how Freeman's book is judged by most academics these days.

I'm a new user (I answered a question about Emma Goldman a few days ago, hopefully adequately) who has lurked for a while on another account. Partly I just wanted to say that I hope to post more soon, supposing some questions come up that I can actually contribute to, and that I really love this subreddit and community.

I have a job with my university's Archives, and we're currently in a project to digitize old issues of our school paper. I've found some pretty weird old-school gossip in there:

• When women were first admitted to the university (in very small numbers, back when it was just a seminary) the men founded a Chastity Society to encourage 'good relations' between the sexes. About two weeks later, the head of the Society was caught uptown with a girl, a quite scandalous act, and in the following weeks practically every member of the Society was similarly found out. The Society quietly disbanded, but it was mocked in the papers for a few years.
• A published debate on the merits of capitalism, in which capitalism was soundly rejected.
• Some early praise for Mussolini and Hitler (though not much, admittedly), and a surprising amount of support for the Spanish Republic.

Just found out that somewhere in the rubble in our museum's cellar are some of the glandes Perusinae, at least according to the pre-war catalogue. What are those, you might ask?

Lead bullets, designed to be thrown by a sling. These specifically were used in the siege of Perusia in 40/41 BC, where the brother of Marcus Antonius (Mark Anthony(?) - by the way, what's up with you anglo-saxons and ancient names?), Lucius, and his wife Fulvia were besieged by the troops of Octavian. The soldiers of besiegers and besieged alike were following the time-honoured tradition of literally adding insult to injury by inscribing those bullets (easily done with lead) with lovely messages such as:

I seek Octavians asshole

I seek Fulvias clit

Bald Lucius Antonius, Fulvia, prepare your assholes

Sit on this, loose Octavian

Greetings, Octavian who sucks dicks

You are starving, and try to hide that from me (just a friendlier way of saying 'I know you'll die soon anyway')

or simply

Take this, Octavian

The penetrating nature of these missiles is thus delightfully coupled with a not-so-subtle assault on the sexual preferences of Lucius and Octavian - being the receptive part was considered aberrant and not acceptable for an adult male. Notice also that the name for such a missile in the singular is glans.

I hope they're still there somewhere. Thankfully (ha!) it's my job to assess what's still there, anyway, but this at least gives me fresh motivation.

I would like to know: At what point in American History would "Another day, another dollar" would have been the actual average income for a daily worker?

Google is somewhat confounded with hip hop lyrics.

I'm not sure if this is appropriate here, but I'm taking a class over the Ottoman Empire/Turkey from 1800 to present next semester and after I did a bit of research on the professor (an article on him on Wikipedia), I found out he has some controversial views about the Armenian Genocide (denial of its genocidal nature). Is this something I should be concerned about? Have you ever had a professor or colleague that held possibly controversial views on a subject in history?

so last week in the history of pornography, I wrote about the work that is cited [NSFW] as the first work of pornography, Aretino's 1527 I Modi.

So I leave you with a dirty poem from the sixteenth century:

He: Lets’ fottere , my love, let’s fottere,

Since all of us were born only to fottere.

You adore the cazzo and I the potta .

The world would be nothing without this act.

If it were proper to fottere after death,

I’d say let’s fottere ourselves to death,

Then we could fottere Adam and Eve,

Who died such a dishonourable death.

**She:**Truly, if those truants hadn’t eaten

that treacherous apple in the garden,

Lovers would long ago have quenched their lust.

But let’s stop chatting. Stick your cazzo in

So that it reaches my heart, and crush the soul

That lives or dies issuing from he cazzo.

He: Don’t leave out my balls [don't stop my orgasm] –

Take [it] inside the potta,

those witnesses of every extreme pleasure

Early in the book Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky briefly mentions the story of an English mob attacking and murdering Hanseatic League members who "could not pronounce 'bread and cheese' in an English accent" in 1381. Some quick Googling has brought up the English Peasant's Revolt in 1381, but I can't seem to find this specific incident. Is it true, and why "bread and cheese"?

A used book table in a community centre I was visiting this week yielded a signed copy of some collected interviews with Elie Wiesel, the diaries of Count Harry Kessler, and Azar Gat's History of Military Thought for a grand total of $10. It was a happy day.

I recently got interested in the history of firearms and how the development of firearms technology changed the battlefield tactic. Is there any good resources where I can learned more regarding this field?

Hello /r/AskHistorians!

I've been looking for the right place to post this recently, and hopefully this fit here!

My boss does an annual 'Christmas quiz' (answer might not be related to christmas) and no one got it last year. I would like to try my hand at it again, using the help of better puzzle solvers than myself.

She thinks in bizarre and unique ways, so the clues are not easily deciphered.

The Prize: I will send every guess you guys send me to her. If you guess the right answer, I will buy ANY $30 USD (total) item from Amazon for you as a shared prize.

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE CURRENT CLUES

Mods: I posted this exact same quiz last year and got great (but not the right) answers. Hopefully this doesn't break the subreddit rules. If it does, feel free to remove it or ask me to alter it. Hopefully my longstanding place in the Reddit community is good enough to be vetted, but if not I would be happy to jump through any hoops you deem necessary.

I remember reading about a guy with an Italian sounding name... I think it started with an "f" and he mysteriously warned Manhattan project about how powerful the bomb would be. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

I very happily put in my Hannukah gift request to my father, asking for a set of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I was bad and spent $70 that I technically didn't really have (as it was budgeted for food) on three books on Wednesday. Oops.

On the other hand, now I have a book about Shanghai women in the cotton mills from 1918(?)-1949, a book about Shanghai prostitutes from the same period, and a copy of Mao's quotations.

No regrets, but a little guilt. Oh well. Early Christmas present to myself?

Is anyone else mildly annoyed by the proliferation of "I saw this random thing, is it historically accurate?" type questions? The answer is usually "No, don't believe everything you read on the Internet." and they don't tend to foster good conversation.

I've noticed question styles tend to come in waves, and perhaps I'm just overly-curmudgeonly regarding the current one.

Hello /R/AskHistorians! After seeing your book list posted on /r/books I've decided to dig into more nonfiction. I always wander the section at Barnes and Noble but never know what to grab. I've seen a lot of books about the Tudors and the war of the roses lately. What would be the best books to get on these subjects?

I'd really appreciate it if someone could give me good book suggestions regarding late 19th century - early 20th century USA. As a European, American Exceptionalism and Jingoism in this period is very interesting to me. Thanks.

Anyone and everyone: what images have you come across in your area of expertise that would make for the coolest tattoos?