My first book is going to come out in September, but I'm concerned no one's going to buy it because it's $175. So, for people who are interested in the topic (see below), I'm encouraging them to ask their librarian or library acquisitions dept. to pre-order the book. They (or anyone, really) can do it from the publisher's official website here.

The book is "A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 1: White American Muslims before 1975". The title pretty much explains the topic--and it's actually the first book on the topic. Prior to this, there were a few books and articles concerning the most famous early white Muslim, but pretty much nothing--not even articles--had ever been published on any of the others.

If you have any questions about the book or the topic, I'd be happy to answer them right here as a sort of informal AMA.

here's a link to a blog post I put up today as a sort of teaser and a way to encourage people to pre-order the book.

(By the way, I just want to put it out there that, despite its high cost, I will pretty much not make any money from the sale of this book. My contract states that I get nothing for the first 300 copies sold [so the publisher can recoup its expenses] and only 5% of each sale after that--and it's rare for a book like this to sell even 300 copies. My main motivation in promoting the book like this is so that it can help increase my chances of landing a good academic/research job.)

Accepted the Ph.D offer. Booked a trip to apartment hunt. Here we go...

To continue my weekly excavation report:

This week we dug many of the smaller structures around one of the main longhouses. Besides these two types of constructions, the monumental estate of the chief and the working-huts of the labourers, we also have a number of more average constructions on our site. One of our main questions was whether these structures are outhouses associated with one of the estates, or whether they are part of this later lower-class reuse of the site. Unfortunately, we can not yet give a definite answer on this, as the features we dug were inconclusive. We did, however, confirm the use of some of these structures as craft-houses. We found another tool for textile production, a lead weight for a spindle, in one of the pit-houses, and a piece of a casting-mould in one of the minor structures. These clay moulds would be used for bronze-casting, making various decorative items or belt-fittings or brooches and the like. The mould we found was probably used to make some kind of button or rivet, but unfortunately we only have the half that was used for the back-side, so we can not say much about the style of the artefact, which would have been very useful for dating. It is, however, very similar to another mould we found last year, so now we can say that the two structures they were found in might have been contemporary.

One of the dark soil-marks we initially thought was a post-hole turned out to be a small grave, and when we dug it we found a little piece of a knife, a handle fragment only 3 cm/2 inch long. This fits with the shape of the pit it was found in, which looks like it might have been a child's grave. There was nothing else left in the grave, even though we searched very carefully, but we assume it is from the 1st-5th centuries AD or so, just like the other graves on the site.

We also made some nice finds in one of the pit-houses, these later craft-huts. It turns out one of them was possibly not so poor after all, because we found a silver coin in it. The coin is of a 'Wodan-Monster' type, showing a bearded face on one side and an animal (a deer?) on the other. Here's a picture of the same type of coin, this one is broken but the one we found is complete. This specific type of coin was made either in Hedeby or Ribe, and minted some time between 775 and 825, most likely in the later part of this period. This might mean that our pit-house, which is one of the latest structures to be built on the site because it overlaps the others, might be older than we initially thought (some time in the late 10th century), but on the other hand these coins could be used for a long time before they are lost in the soil. The type of big house that it overlaps is also quite narrow in time, being very typical for the decades around 950 or so. Together, these two sources now give us a fairly good grip on the time the site was in use.

We saved the best for last on our site, and with one week left, we can now start on the last two pit-houses and one of the biggest long-houses. To better help us see the structure of the dark splotches of soil we are looking for, we cleaned up the entire excavation again, taking of a few centimeters of soil, and took a picture with a drone. From the sky the shape of the walls of the long-house is quite clear, as are the two pit-houses that were dug down into it. We are much looking forward to digging these last three buildings, and hope they contain a couple more telling artefacts.

I was at a symposium earlier this week for the 70th anniversary of the Manhattan Project, at the Carnegie Institute of Science in Washington, DC. It was pretty great. I got to hang out with a lot of great historians (including Richard Rhodes, Kai Bird, and Martin Sherwin), and a number of the few remaining Manhattan Project veterans (who were great). I gave a talk on the size, scope, and improbability of the Manhattan Project. I gave them a little preview of a new interactive map I am making of every Manhattan Project site I can track down — well over 230 at this point. He's a version of it I tweeted earlier in the week (even this has been improved a lot since then, but I'm still working on it). (Blue = gov't/military site; Green = educational institution; Orange = private industry.)

The absolutely craziest things that happened, though:

• I got to hold the original arming plugs from the Little Boy bomb. The green plug was kept in the bomb until the Enola Gay was already in flight. Then one of the weaponeers had to crawl back into the unpressurized bomb bay, remove it, and put a red plug in its place. That electronically "armed" the bomb. The green plug here is the original one. The red was a spare the weaponeer kept in his pocket (because if he had only brought one, and accidentally dropped it in the bomb bay, he would not have been able to fish it out and the mission would have to be aborted). The original red plug was destroyed over Hiroshima, of course.

• One of the ancient veterans brought a very unusual, very unique, very classified artifact. It was a lucite hemisphere he had made right after the war ended, cast into the same mold that forged the plutonium pits for the Trinity and Fat Man bombs. He also mixed in some Trinitite (atomic bomb-fused glass), just for fun. (Other angles.) I've never heard of anything like this, or seen anything like this. He must have violated an untold number of security and safety rules to produce it. He's too old for them to touch him, at this point.

It was a pretty impressive meeting. I am going to try and post a writeup of it on my blog on Monday. I am still a little exhausted from the whole thing.

How do you manage your digital archival photos? I've just downloaded a huge pile of them from the USC Digital Libraries. They come as a .jp2, and a text file of the same name with description.

I want to automatically annotate all of them with the description, so I don't have to flip back and forth between things, and so I can search descriptions and display the corresponding photo a lot more easily. I don't want the annotation embedded in the photo, but I want it visible at the same time.

Software I have installed that will deal with photos in some way or another: typical OSX stuff (Photos, Preview, etc.), Evernote, HyperResearch, Acorn, Inkscape, Scrivener. Can any of these do what I want? If not, other ideas?

Since /u/Reedstilt's guess the artefact game was pretty fun a couple weeks ago, there has been some suggestion to have another round, so I say go for it. Try to give the period!

I'm continually frustrated by the lack of historical knowledge and education in colleges. It seems that even with the required history courses in most colleges, students are either not paying attention or teachers are not getting the content across. It's astounding to me what conspiracies and what ideas get propagated by students and by faculty. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Imagine it is 1918 and I hop in a trench in northern France. How far south can I go before I need to hop out again?

I gave my last lecture yesterday; binge-watching war movies since then.

I'm really annoyed at the lack of easy access to British local papers. I'm trying to find the ones for Madeley in Shropshire so I can analyse a broad social change for research continuing on from my dissertation, but the sources are either missing or weren't preserved.

I recently implemented a Word of the Day feature on my Tumblr. Each day I post a random word from one of the dictionaries I have, which include Nahuatl, Mayan, Purepecha, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mixe. I only really know the grammar for Nahuatl and a little bit for Mayan. I'm really hoping no one asks me questions about the others.

Since about August of last year I've gained most of my followers and I'm at 2,790 as of this morning.

I know it's a dumb question, but is the start of WWII at the Rape of Nanking the overall consensus? It seems to teeter between different sources on WWII and if it started in the Rape of Nanking or the invasion of Poland.

How credible is Amiantus Marcellus as a historian?

Quick question, what were some of the best/worst years in the general area of the 20th century for the U.S., around 1900-1990? (this is in part for some research i'm doing, but i want this subreddit's input) I've narrowed some of the best down to the post-WWII economic boom, possibly the mid-60s, and some of the worst to the initial great depression, as well as a few of the years in the 70s during the draft era and Vietnam.

How common is the concept of surrendering in warfare throughout history?

Does anyone have a reccomendation on any readings to learn more in depth about Louis III of France? (Of the Carolingians) Thanks.

What are some bad academically published history books that I either should not cite on here or any where?