I've been reading recently about the French historiographical debate in the literature on the First World War between "consent" and "coercion" as a driving factor of shaping France's war culture from 1914-18. In short, the "consent" side argues that the nation and particularly its citizen-soldiers consented to the violence they endured in the name of national defence. The "coercion" side counteracts the narrative of consent by arguing that soldiers and citizens were coerced into supporting the war by increasingly authoritarian state control and by waving the false banner of nationalism. Ultimately it comes down to whether the French believed they were fighting a worthwhile cause, and accepted the costs of it, or if they were fooled or pressured into supporting the war through propaganda and quelling dissent.

Apparently this debate has been raging for many years at this point, but I just explored it fully in the last couple of weeks. It's interesting to me because as a Canadian First World War historian, it's completely removed from my "reading" of the First World War, since it's not very present at all in the Canadian literature. We just talk about different things in different ways, and it really underlines how separated historiography can be when separated by language and an ocean. I think this is rapidly changing though - I mean, in this case there's been a lot of discussion in English (but still focused around the European literature rather than Canadian), but I also learned about it through online journals and purchasing digital editions of books. There was a time when I would have had to buy the books in France or Britain! Or wait weeks to have them arrive by mail.

It's also neat because Canadian historians have been talking about this debate between consent and coercion, but without using these terms or even naming it as such. Instead, history is split between military/battlefront history and social/political history. The first tends to talk a lot about consent to the war and emphasize Canada's patriotic war narrative, while the second tends to highlight the coercive nature of the war for Canadians in reference to the state, class, ethnicity, etc.

Makes me think about how historiography will change in the coming decades as "national boundaries" become more porous and historians begin talking to each other. Transnational - the current buzzword out there - is very much a reality today I think, and we will see (hopefully) surprising results of it from historians soon. The other day I used Google Scholar and Google Translate to read(editor's note: skim) a Spanish article on memory. I can't exactly cite it, but I now know there a thriving Spanish historiography on memory!

Of course, this forum is a great example of transnational connections, even if it's probably skewed towards the primary demographic of Reddit's user-base (white, male, Western, English-speaking).

Did anyone else see the New Yorker article on humanities dissertations as tweets? I found mine:

After a given date, a new technology meant that all of culture was somehow different.

I'm also partial to

This is why we can't have nice things.

I keep seeing people mention the Toba eruption on Reddit, yet none of them really explains in depth what it is about other than some eruption occurred ~75k years ago and created a supposed bottleneck for homo sapiens. It doesn't seem to make much sense to me with humanity having left Africa and spread itself around much. There's also little to mention how this eruption affected Neanderthals or Denisovians. Anyone more well read on this?