I declared my history major this week! Yay!

I just submitted my first-ever proposal to an academic conference!

Temple University (my current home) hosts a grad student conference every spring. I would have put up the link here, but an email snafu left me off the mailing list for the Call for Papers. If anyone has some research they want to show off and/or wants to come to Philly for a few days, we're still accepting abstracts and CVs. I can interested folks get the email address.

Does anyone have any tips for how to create a poster for an academic conference? I'm presenting at a graduate conference next month and have foolishly said that I would like to do an A3 poster as well. The problem is that I have no idea how to make one, so any tips would be appreciated, particularly on what software to use and how detailed it should be.

This is a very minor question, but the thread on Mohammed piqued my interest: When did we start calling the Eastern Roman Empire "Byzantium"? And why? Also, is ERE correct, or just Roman empire, or do we call them Byzantines?

Apologies if that's a long, complicated answer ...

I've decided I want to be a military analyst when I grow up. Going to college next year for my political science degree, woohoo!

Last December, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015, which, miraculously, contained a provision for establishing a Manhattan Project National Historical Park. In practice this "just" means that the National Park Service is authorized to take possession of a lot of Manhattan Project facilities which the Department of Energy was not really maintaining (and sometimes actively destroying), and to build publicly-accessible exhibits around them (eventually). This has been moderately controversial, because a lot of (usually fairly lefty) people have argued that it would necessarily be a "glorification" of the atomic bombing of Japan. I wrote a blog post about why I thought this was a completely silly way to think about this move, and why I support this bill, even though I am pretty lefty myself. Basic punchline: it's good to have contested sites, and if the only alternative is decay and destruction, that's not much of an alternative.

Separately, for the last two days (and tomorrow, too), I have been in a workshop at the National Science Foundation, trying to help clarify what NSF's new (since 2011) Data Management Plan requirements ought to mean for historians and philosophers of science. It is a very tricky issue that cuts into a lot of contested ground and a lot of questions about "data." Tomorrow we will meet up with a parallel committee from the field of Science and Technology Studies and see if we see eye to eye at all (maybe?).

Did high schoolers have less homework in the 1960s

I'm a huge wwii guy and always love new information about that era. My question is.. what is something you know about the era that is pretty unknown? Pretty vague question but any and all information is welcome.

I thought of a future project idea last night. I remember reading an article in my undergrad about a researcher who was trying to find more ruins in the thick jungle of the Maya region. He buried this positron detector, which was the size of a fridge, deep in the ground and left it there for like a year. The detector measured the speed of positrons as it passed through differing materials. The positrons would go more quickly through dirt than stone, for example. In this way the researcher was able to find things in the jungle. I just wish I could remember who the researcher was or what the article was titled.

I was thinking I could do the same thing in Jalisco to look for shaft tombs. The best spot I would put it is in the El Arenal shaft tomb which is 18 meters deep. It's the perfect spot. No other shaft tomb so far is as deep as El Arenal. Many tombs have no surface indication that they're there (they possibly had perishable structures nearby in the past, but no one has looked for post holes yet). The only reason the El Arenal tomb was discovered and looted was because it was underneath a platform of a guachimonton. Looters tend to dig into the center of any pre-Columbian mound to find hollow ceramic figures from the region. Depending on the range, I might find a lot more tombs than we think are there. If need be, I could always bury others just as deep to create a triangulation effect. Only a handful of unlooted tombs have ever been excavated so to find even a single chambered tomb would be phenomenal. More so if it was Middle Formative rather than Late Formative (we know almost nothing about the Middle Formative).

Just submitted my first abstract for a conference. Granted its being hosted by a department at our university, and I'm mostly using a paper I wrote last semester (revised and updated as things literally changed the day after I handed it in), but it still counts.

Just sent off my abstract for a conference in April, feeling good about this one.

I really like listening to historical and "traditional" music, so what is the music from your area of study? I am particularly interested in "popular music", so more broadside ballads than Beethoven.

For my area, the Song of Seikilos is the most solidly reconstructed piece of music (and actually quite nice), but there are several groups, such as Musica Romana and Synaulia. I can't speak much as to actual accuracy, but it is an interesting attempt and some of the stuff is pretty good.

What can I do for a job if I major in history?

Can anyone recommend a good history podcast? Any and all subjects welcome. I tried getting into Hardcore History and it just didn't work for me.