I started watching the Marco Polo series (fantastically entertaining and stuffed to the gills with scenery porn of the Eurasian Steppe) and it made me realize what is perhaps the single greatest inaccuracy in most historical shows: time. I'm not saying that nobody ever hurried in the pre-industrial world, but without modern advances in transportation there is just no reason to rush around so much. If it takes a month to ride from origin to destination, a few hours isn't really something to get hot and bothered by. For example, the distance between Karakorum and Beijing (which is where I assume Kublai's palace is) is 1,300 kilometers in a straight line, and in practically every episode people will just sort of casually drop in to one or the other. or an even better example is when one character casually says that Karakorum is two weeks ride from Wuhan which, given that they are 2000 km apart as the Daoist immortal flies, would imply a speed of at least 142 km a day. And yet when one character arrives in Wuhan he is distressed that another had not as if they had arranged to meet for lunch at 2:00.

The classic example, of course, is Gladiator, in which Maximus gallops all the way from Germany to Spain.

This is an uncharacteristic break from historical reality from a show that shows such scrupulous accuracy in the depiction of blind Taoist kung fu monks.

All these questions about colour perception lately have, apart from being a bit surprising (do people really think that human physiology changes that much from one millennium to the next, or that language is that central to cognition?), reminded me of another old chestnut about ancient Greek colour terms: that Homer's word for the colour of the sky was "bronze". It's a related thing: supposedly, since he had no word for "blue", he had to call it "bronze" instead.

Well, the fact that I'm posting about it here probably warns you in advance that it's not true. Homeric epic does indeed refer to "bronze sky" three times (Iliad 5.504, 17.425; Odyssey 3.2) but there's absolutely no reason to interpret it as a colour term. It becomes a bit more obvious if you look at other uses of "bronze" as an adjective. First, Iliad 18.222:

ὄπα χάλκεον Αἰακίδαο

the bronze voice of Achilleus

Similarly Iliad 5.785:

Στέντορι εἰσαμένη μεγαλήτορι χαλκεοφώνῳ

...making herself look like the great-hearted bronze-voiced Stentor

(I guess this is where we get "stentorian"?) Next, Iliad 11.241-2, the death of Iphidamas:

ὣς ὃ μὲν αὖθι πεσὼν κοιμήσατο χάλκεον ὕπνον
οἰκτρὸς ἀπὸ μνηστῆς ἀλόχου...

In this way [Iphidamas] toppled and fell into a bronze sleep, pitiful, away from his wedded wife...

And Iliad 5.704:

χάλκεος Ἄρης

bronze Ares

It should be pretty transparent that the meaning is figurative. In these passages it evidently means "pitiless, terrible, harsh". That being the case, it'd be daft to assume that when it gets used of the sky it suddenly turns into a colour term. Exactly what shade of metaphor we're looking at in the "sky" passages is open to debate, though. It could be "pitiless, terrible" as elsewhere, making "pitiless sky" a pathetic fallacy. It could mean "bright" or "strong". It could be a reference to the "bronze-pathed house of Zeus". One alternative that I find appealing, if not exactly compelling, is that it could be a reference to an upturned cauldron, for which one word was χαλκίον.

Finally, as a matter of interest, the same metaphor appears in the Hebrew bible in Deuteronomy 28.23:

The sky over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron.

I don't think anyone's ever taken that as a reference to the colours of the sky and earth.

One of the atomic bomb questions that comes up on here quite often is whether anybody talked about "demonstrating" the atomic bomb before dropping it on Japan, and whether it was feasible. Well, I just posted a new blog post on this very subject: "To demonstrate, or not to demonstrate?" It covers the history of this debate in 1945 in brief, and then speculates a little on the counterfactual dimensions. My conclusion is that while many of the common present-day objections to a demonstration are not very well-founded (e.g. they didn't have enough bombs to demonstrate one, it would have been hard to do, fallout would have been deadly anyway), ultimately I don't think a demonstration probably would have worked, and it probably would have got the US into even more problematic of a moral bind.

So I've been in a research mode of recent, and would love to harness the collective Google-fu of everyone.

In the 1960s, Zhukov gave an interview that ended up being censored by the soviet authorities, but came to light after the fall of the USSR and was released. It is in Russian however (surprise surprise!), and to say my Russian is rudimentary would be insulting to the language skills of a Russian three year old. I've been able to find a transcript of the interview in Russian, which is made almost semi-legiable with Google translate, but after wasting a few hours of my day yesterday, I can't find an English transcript. Any help would be awesome!

I picked up a copy of Crimson Rain, a so far brilliant and rather disturbing study of violence in Macheng County, Hubei since the Ming by William Rowe. One thing that strikes me is Rowe's ability to draw upon deep traditions of local folklore to provide alternate accounts of historical events, and it made me wonder whether this is a resource widely available or if it is somewhat distinctive to Chinese culture's highly historiographic tendencies. In particular, I am wondering whether the rise of mass media in the West has erased these local alternate histories, so that, for example, a diverse environment of different local bandit heroes gets replaced by Robin Hood.

This makes me so incredibly angry....

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-31760656

I have a history bachelor's degree, but all my work history (I'm in my late 30s) is computer programming/websites/internet/databases. How can I utilize my technical background in the history field? Is there any resource for finding programming jobs/data analytics jobs related to history?

I have a bit of an open-ended thought experiment for the academics here. This was inspired by the Rome, Sweet Rome thread from a few years ago, in which /u/Prufrock451 posted his famous hypothetical account of US Marines sent back to late Republican Rome.

Say we develop the technology to send someone from the present (voluntarily) on a one-way trip back in time. You can choose to send one university professor/lecturer of a certain field of study, with the implication that the professor will use his/her knowledge to the benefit of humanity. For example, a professor of medicine could provide modern knowledge on sanitation, anatomy, and procedures to the medical practitioners of the time.

What type of professor do you send back to make the greatest impact, and when/where do you send him/her?

Rules:

1. The professor is not necessarily at the top of his/her field, but is competent.
2. The individual can share knowledge unrelated to their field which they would have acquired as a matter of course, so a math professor will know about, but may not be able to fully explain, concepts such as germ theory, atomic theory, etc.
3. The professor will have an indestructible textbook for their field, i.e. they will not need to rely on memory.
4. Keep in mind how the local populace will react to what the professor is trying to teach. Will they accept it, laugh it off as impossible, or even try to harm the professor?
5. Assume the professor will be relatively able to integrate into the society they find.

Looking forward to whatever you can come up with!

I had a polish holocaust survivor speak at my school today. It was really horrible... she talked about how her aunt gave up her baby to the Germans because she couldn't support him and the Germans said they would take care of him and return him when he was strong enough on his own. A few months later they said her son had sadly died, but it turned out it was because the Nazis were transfusing the babies' blood to send to the frontline soldiers. (sorry if this doesn't make much sense, I'm a bit sleepy.)

I saw this comic today

White Guy Dibs,

http://completelyseriouscomics.com/?p=828

This morning I got a notice of another article acceptance! I'm just waiting on the edited second reader's report, but they're not asking for much ("try to address the comments and get it back to us" is how the editor put it)--so I'm happy about that.

Is there a good book on the economics of the first world war? Both the production and the finance aspect. How much money did flow between the diffrent allies? A similar analysis for the second world was would also be intresting. How importent was land lease from the US to the USSR.

Any American culture Historians of recent history or of Ninja History?

I'm trying to do research on the marketing of Ninjas, particularly in America, and I can't find a lot of scholarly research to read.

Thanks

Anybody know of a good history of the British East India Company? I'm especially looking for post-Seven Years War.

I just finished watching 'They Chose China' last night and found it really interesting. Does anyone know if any other resources/works about this?

I know this is cliche but I love this subreddit! Thank you mods who make this by far the most educational subreddit! Thank you to the whole community for always being helpful!