This has been a completely crazy week. Flew to DC on Monday, did consulting on Tuesday for a non-profit history organization that is looking for ideas in how to reorient its digital history programs. On Wednesday, I recorded a radio interview to air at a future date on NPR (which was very fun but took about 3 hours total of actual recording, plus many hours of prep work so I could seem like I had every single possible fact that could come up right on my tongue). On Thursday I gave a talk at a conference sponsored by and held at the Department of State.

In the interim spaces of all of the above I was finished the fact-checking process for an article that came out on Thursday afternoon on the New Yorker's website: "The First Light of Trinity", marking the 70th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test. Which is super super super duper awesome. And was a lot of work!

Then I got on a plane and flew to New Mexico for work I am doing out here relating to the television show I consult for. Fly back home on Sunday. Phew!

Don't forget, I'm doing my Manhattan Project AMA next week, so start saving up your WWII atomic bomb questions...

I put a challenge to the fine folks of /r/BadHistory a moment a go, so if anyone here would like to play along, here's what you've got to do:

Take this map and fill in as many Native American nations as you can recall.

EDIT: I've decided that later today, I'll go through all maps that people have submitted and make one of my own showing where the answers should have gone and which nations should in the place of misplaced labels. It's going to be easier than commenting on each map individually. Glad you're playing along, and keep them coming!

Here's an old Korean legend my grandfather told me:

Once upon a time there was a rich man in Korea with the surname Yi (Li in Chinese) who had a lowly servant with the surname of Ju (Zhou in Chinese). The fathers of the rich man and servant had both recently died, and the two wandered the peninsula looking for an auspicious place to bury the two.

Finally in Jinhae they found two hills. There they learned that the hill on the left was an auspicious site that would lead to an emperor, while the hill on the right was nothing more than a place for a king's ancestors. Yi told his servant to bury his own (Yi's) father on the left and the servant's father on the right.

But the devious Ju decided to bury his father on the left and his master's father on the right, and Yi never learned the truth. Eventually Ju was expelled from Korea and fled to China, while Yi remained in the peninsula.

According to the legend one of Ju the servant's descendants became Zhou Yuanzhang, first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China. Yi the master's descendant was Yi Seonggye, first king of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea.

The Chinese imperial house as a servant to the royal house of Korea - an interesting folk parallel to the Korean court's sinophilia and veneration of the Ming.

Well, it was the last day of excavation this season at Tel Ashkelon. Today was mostly just last bits of things, getting final elevations and final photos for the excavation areas, working out how to take 3d models of some objects for measurement on the computers, etc. Then, at the end of the dig day (1pm), the dig director walks into the office where I am working on a 3d model of an artifact, and tells me (not in so many words) that I have to run out to another area that is trying to finish and survey for them because they are finding some awesome stuff. I ended up pulling a double shift, getting back to my room at 6pm, with plenty of work left to do for the weekend. But it's all good, it's always fun to pull doubles with staff members. We had over 110 combined years of excavation experience working together to finish the project, and it was awesome.

Now all I have left to do tomorrow is to finish drawing the final top plans, get a set of preliminary phase plans to the area supervisors, and continue working on the 3d models. If I can get those things done before Sunday morning, I will be in good shape.

It's always kind of sad saying goodbye to the awesome volunteers who do so much work to make the dig happen. Lots of amazing things happened and it was fantastic. It was a very successful season.

If you are interested in reading a little about what we did during the season, we run a blog that updates every day. We'll be updating regularly for the next week as we go through staff week and get everything squared away for the offseason and finish our bookwork, but theres two months of backlog from this excavation season sitting there for you to read, if that strikes your fancy.

The URL is http://digashkelon.com/blog

Back in the Civil War AMA, /u/TacticusPrime wanted to know about how members of the Confederate Congress from Kentucky, Missouri, and Union-controlled territories were chosen. /u/Irishfafnir knew such members served, but wasn't familar with how they came by their seats.

Tacticus pointed to Kenneth Martis’ Historical Atlas of the Congresses of the Confederate States of America: 1861-1865 as potentially having an answer. It’s a really good question and I was curious myself. Having had good luck buying used books off Amazon, I took the plunge and got it. With the book in hand I'm positive that I saw it for sale at the Fredericksburg battlefield gift shop back in 2002. No idea if they were charging the crazy price that Amazon asks for a new one, though. Anyway, I haven't had time to read the book in detail but I dug in for the relevant answers:

A little background

There are two or three Confederate Congresses, depending on how one wants to count. The first was a provisional and unicameral body. The second was the permanent Congress with a House and Senate, which operated from February 18, 1861-March 18, 1865. The permanent Congress had two congresses and six sessions. So we have three potential sets of legislators to look at, the one set of provisionals and two groups of permanent Congress members. For context, Martis provides a table. Looking at each in turn:

Provisional Congress: February 4, 1861-February 17, 1862

Voting in this body was by state, with each state possessing one vote. States had delegates apportioned equal to their representation in the United States Congress. This starts before Sumter is fired upon, so initially only Lower South states are involved. They met in Montgomery until the third session, which they called at Richmond. How did the choose who went to Montgomery for the writing of the Confederate Constitution and so forth?

Per Martis, six of the seven Lower South states elected its delegates with a majority vote of their secession convention. Florida was the odd state out. There the governor chose. When the Upper South states followed the Lower South out after Sumter, most of them also send provisional congress members nominated and voted in by the secession conventions, with the notable exception of Tennessee. There they used the regular congressional elections set for August. That had the awkward problem of not giving Tennessee its full slate. It was entitled to 12 seats, but had congressional districts to elect only ten. More awkward still, Tennesseans went to the polls and in East Tennessee they elected pro-Union men. Three of those found their way into the US Congress.

This brings us to the two problem states, where proto-Confederates did not gain control of the state government. In Missouri and Kentucky, they took the proverbial balls and went home. For the Show Me State, that meant a rump of secessionist legislators meeting in Clarksville appointed two senators and seven representatives. The governor of Missouri, Claiborne Fox Jackson, signed off on the appointments. He had run as a Unionist in 1860 but had been part of the group of proslavery Democrats who ousted moderate, longtime senator Thomas Hart Benton in the early 1850s. He also took part in the election-stealing invasions of Kansas in that decade. Not exactly the record of a consistent moderate.

Kentucky chose its members of the provisional congress by vote of a similar rump. In this case, it was a sort of convention rather than a pure rump of the state legislature, with 115 delegates from 68 counties showing up. They voted secession, asked for admission to the Confederacy, and elected ten councilmen and a provisional governor to manage the state’s affairs. Those eleven men chose ten delegates to go off to the provisional congress.

First Congress, elected November 6, 1861 and sitting February 18, 1862-February 17, 1864

Members here had individual votes. The House included 106 seats.The Senate had twenty-six, Senators elected by state legislatures. Slaves still counted as ⅗ of a person for representation in the House. The fifteen antebellum slave states would have had an even thirty, but Delaware and Maryland never had representation as no conventions, rump or otherwise, passed ordinances of secession and asked for admission to the Confederacy. Missouri and Kentucky did by action of their rump secession conventions. By this point we have substantial parts of the notional Confederacy under Union control, including two entire states.

Every Confederate state except South Carolina was entitled to more delegates in the Confederate Congress than they had been in the US Congress. This meant the other states had to draw new districts. The Missouri government-in-exile got thirteen seats, up from seven, in the CSA House. They appointed only nine, two senators and seven representatives. That is if you count it as a separate appointment when they just rolled over their nine guys from the provisional congress.

Kentucky drew new districts, which its Confederate government did not generally control. They called for elections in January, 1862. Some more or less conventional elections took place, one apparently within two miles of a Union camp, but the majority of the vote was probably soldiers (officers would collect the votes of soldiers from authorizing states) and refugees (As long as they were still in-state they could go to an operating polling place and declare their status. Out of state, sometimes you could also go to an army camp and cast your vote this way). It’s “probably” because quite a bit of research did not turn up the election returns, at least as of 1994, the second-largest lacuna (after Virginia’s) in the record. Voting took place on a general ticket, essentially at large for multiple seats rather than by the districts. Kentucky originated general ticket elections in the Confederacy and they became the norm, if not universal, later on.

Federal troops occupied good sections of Virginia, including a majority of some districts in the northwest. (This is part of the future West Virginia.) Martis reports that data is lacking for Virginia, very strangely considering that it had the most newspapers, largest population, and so forth. He says that votes in those districts “probably” were probably by soldiers and refugees, as would be done in 1863. Various other areas were partially occupied, but the remainder of those districts held ordinary elections augmented by soldier and refugee voting.

Overall, “eighty-four out of the 106 House districts, 79.2 percent, held free and open elections for the white male electorate on November 6, 1861. […] Union occupation altered the election process in twenty-two districts in three states, Virginia, Missouri, and Kentucky.” Overall, 33% of the CSA’s House also served in the Provisional Congress. The CSA Senate did better, coming in with half incumbents. Only Louisiana and Virginia returned over half their provisional members to the permanent Congress. Florida, Texas, and Mississippi chucked their entire slate.

Second Congress, elected May 1863-May 1864, sitting May 2, 1864-March 18, 1865

Same rules as the previous Congress, but now a lot more of the Confederacy comes under occupation. The really late elections happened in Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas, which were entirely or substantially controlled by the Union.

Kentucky, its government hanging out with the Army of Tennessee, once more had a general ticket.

Missouri, now operating about of Marshall, TX, arranged for a special Confederacy-wide Missouri election by general ticket. This resulted in a pretty heavy turnover in its delegation.

Arkansas had ordinary elections where it could, but ended up having enough trouble with them that the Confederate Congress authorized special elections to fix the issues. It appears that even in Confederate-controlled areas some elections simply didn't happen. The special elections were to be by district, not general ticket.

Virginia had regular elections and didn’t resort to a general ticket. State law allowed for soldiers and refugees from occupied districts to vote. Partially occupied districts got soldiers, refugees, and regular voting in the unoccupied sections. Only four districts in south-central VA were free of outside disruptions, but even in these some records are missing.

Elsewhere occupied sections were handled by general ticket votes, though Mississippi judged that it had enough territory still under its control to hold ordinary elections all around. Elections went on as usual in unoccupied districts.

Overall, six of the thirteen Confederate states held more or less free, undisturbed elections. Two were entirely unoccupied. Five had occupied districts. This works out to sixty-one districts (57.6%) operating normally. Forty-three districts, 42.4% had various irregularities. Nine occupied districts were in states that held normal district elections, four of which with elections entirely by soldiers and refugees outside their bounds. Five districts (VA-09 and 10, MS-04, and “probably” AK-01 and 03) were occupied but a few counties still reported civilian votes to go with the soldiers and refugees.

Ukraine v Russia for women's sabre team gold at Fencing World Champs going on right now. Winner gets to keep Crimea I assume?

I have a random find I'd like to share.

In response to one of those comments about how "Abraham Lincoln was a racist, and therefore no better than Southern slaveholders!" I went looking for something to provide a little perspective. Particularly I went to the words of Frederick Douglass, and found an absolute gem of a speech I had never seen before. It was an oration he gave on the eleventh anniversary of Lincoln's assassination in coordination with the unveiling of the Freedmans' Memorial in Washington DC.

The whole speech is worth reading. But here is my favorite part (and a perfect answer to those who like to characterize Lincoln as nothing more than a racist):

I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

Alright, /u/Tiako (and anyone else interested), let's get down to war movies. Band of Brothers is WAY better than The Pacific. Why? I have several reasons.

First, and most importantly, I think, is that BoB follows a larger but more coherent group of soldiers than tP. It begins with training; that whole first episode about Tacoa, with David Schwimmer's outstanding performance as the hated Captain Sobel, is a powerful introduction to the whole series. We get to know many of the characters that we'll follow for the remainder of the series and we share their struggles and get attached to them. When they are wounded, killed, or survive in later episodes, we're a lot more invested in them. And, there's a LOT of them in whom we have a stake. By contrast, tP really doesn't do this nearly as well. They're in combat from the first episode, so we don't get to know the cast as well and the cast itself is not a coherent group. We meet Eugene Sledge, for example, but his delayed entry into the war means that he doesn't see much action alongside other characters like Basilone and Leckie. They cross paths a bit, but this is not a cohesive group (like a "band" of close men, "brothers" even) that we follow throughout.

Second, I think that the nature of the European versus Pacific campaigns make it easier to invest small-unit actions with broader significance in Europe than the Pacific. Perhaps this was just a problem of story-telling, and perhaps this is my own knowledge helping me, but it seemed throughout that in BoB, we always understood how the strategic significance related to the specifics of the small units and individuals we're following. For example, we know that when Winters leads the men in their assault on the German guns at Brecourt Manor, that this was important for the bigger success of Normandy; the same is true with their attack on Carentan, and their repulse of the German counter attack. Their participation in Market-Garden is a little more mysterious, but their actions in Bastogne are again really clearly linked to the Battle of the Bulge. And, when BoB gets to the end of the war and the human costs, they have the Holocaust to contend with.

By contrast, tP is really only good at connecting small units to bigger stuff on Guadalcanal. There, it's clear that they MUST hold off the Japanese attacks because of the importance of the island in the bigger picture, or that the group we're following is holding a delicate part of the line and anticipating a counter-attack. Those are some of the most compelling moments of the whole series. Beyond that, however, their combat scenes I actually found quite tedious. The Peliliu landing is terrifying, a bloodbath, just like the landing on Iwo Jima (following two different units), but the campaigns that we see on the rest of Peliliu and then later on Okinawa are pretty much just "Here's a hill, the enemy's over there. Let's shoot them. Okay, here's another hill with the enemy. Let's shoot them. Boy, it's hot out here. Here's another hill." There's a really tedious inevitability about it all. It's almost like a horror movie, in which you're just sort of waiting to see which people will survive.

That said, I think tP did have some really compelling stuff. Leckie was a great character, as were Sledge and Snafu. I thought they dealt with PTSD really well--known then as "Battle Fatigue," hence the "He's just tired" explanation all the time. BoB did okay on that subject also, though it strikes me as a pre-Iraq War kind of treatment--there, but not central to the lives and psyches of the soldiers. tP in that sense really reflects the way that PTSD has made its way into popular culture (again) with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the best parts, for example, is in the first episode on Guadalcanal, the morning after the Japanese attack along that creek where it meets the beach, when that machine gun operator looks out and sees a massive crowd of men that he killed the night before. He seems to have this look on his face like, "This has really happened, and was not a dream. I can't go home, and I'm stuck here." The psychological impact is just massive. Compare that to BoB's first combat scenes, when they survive the jump into Normandy and then ambush a German group. No one really hesitates or deals with the psychological shock of being in mortal danger and killing others. Blythe, their one really big PTSD story, is a bit of an isolated case. He's more the exception than the rule in that series, and he's only involved for an episode.

I also thought that the Melbourne episode was terrific; that episode brought these men back into civilian life and gave so much depth to their characters, in retrospect it just makes me wish that we'd seen much more of that sort of thing before they'd shipped out in the first place.

Also, I think it's hilarious that Shane from the Walking Dead was in tP, performing pretty much the same function: an important early character who dies.

Well, sense it looks like announcing our blogs has gotten to be the cool thing, I made a blog that will eventually be getting some form of organization. This post seems to have been well liked, so maybe start there?

Better Know an Historian is back! And today we sit down with my own personal AH hero /u/erus, who is my hero because he has been consistently writing deep detailed musicology and music theory questions here for about two years, and he talks to us about the follies of "great men" thinking in music history, and shares 5 of his favorite musical recordings...

I just wanted to say to you lot, thank you. I've been having a...shitty time recently. I want to die now and I wanted to die often. Step in front of cars. Kill myself. I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up and some days I still do. Today was a particularly bad day, to be honest. And Reddit was useful- well, especially /r/AskHistorians among other good sub reddest which were fun (and often history related). It's taken me into a whole new world and out of the world I was really quite desperate not to live in. So you are one of quite a few reasons why I'm still alive, so thank you.

Anyway, aside from that, I'm reading up on the history of Roma slavery in Romania. It's very interesting (and sad, of course). I'm interested especially in the early history of Roma slavery under the Tatars especially which there is comparatively little information about. Any books about Roma slavery from the 13-19th centuries?

Does anyone have any good suggestions for a history of coinage or an in-depth examination of historical money policies for any country?

Despite their quasi Hail Corporate-esque nature I'd highly recommend these two videos - one about Carrier, the other about OSRAM - concerning the latest conservation efforts (new AC/filtration system and LED lighting, respectively) that have been recently undertaken within the Sistine Chapel. They make for an interesting watch IMHO.

Hey everyone I hope you're all enjoying your friday evenings!

As a Psychologist (as well as a Historian) recently, I've started to think why some of the most pioneering psychologists of the 19th & 20th Century are mainly German or American: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, B.F. Skinner, Edward Thorndike, Philip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram, Masters & Johnson, Alfred Kinsey & Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Just to name a few, are all examples of this.

So I just wondered what was going on in the German & English speaking worlds for thought to go from seeing Psychology as part of Philosophy as late as 1860 (upon the development of Gustav Fechner's "Psychophysics") to the famous psychological theories of Id, Ego & Superego, Psychosexual development, Dream interpretation, Individuation, Persona, Operant conditioning, Skinner's Box, Thorndike's Law of effect, Standford prison experiment, The Kinsey scale & Psychopathia Sexualis just to name a few?

Thank you to anyone that can answer my queries :)

TLDR: I just wondered if anyone knows how & why thought in the German & English speaking (mainly Germany, Austria, Switzerland, & America) "worlds" changed from seeing Psychology as a subsidiary of Philosophy to the groundbreaking theories that we all know today? Is this shift in thought in anyway linked to the 19th-20th Centuries occult movement in Germany & America?

Does anyone know if there has been recent progress on deciphering the Indus script? Everything I see online is pretty dated.

anyone else interested in /u/georgy_k_Zhukov (or other mods) expanding on his thoughts from the AMA with reddit's new chief?

Finally back! Due to lack of computer (and laziness) I have to very quickly prepare documents for three month funded stay in Marburg next year. Was anybody on scholarship for PhD students in Herder Institut?

Has anyone watched this documentary called Hannibal vs Rome ?

if so is this any good ? I know next to nothing about Carthage and was looking for something to watch during my free time. I know it can't be as good as a book but I wanted to know if this is complete crap or a decent documentary ?

Thanks

here's sort of a meta question: what do you guys think about citing "history of philosophy podcast" as a source given it's produced by an academic w/ a fair number of interviews with other academic philosophers.

I'm taking a class currently called "Introduction to the holocaust", and so far we've seen how the NSDAP, and Germany as a whole vilified having a common enemy of the state and how they must unite against this enemy and serve in the front lines to form this sort of partnership among members of the Aryan race. We also saw how WWI gave this back-stabbed myth from the commanders saying how not one battle was lost and how no enemy troops were ever stationed on German soil, so it must be an internal weakening of the Germans through the non-Aryan races. That plus the international craze of eugenics led to this idea that those who were non-Aryan, or unabled Aryans were to be sterilized. Based on the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (1933), this was almost entirely up to the practitioner regardelss of standing and often led to the sterilization of anyone that seemed contrary to the Aryan race or the NSDAP's political goals.

So I have a small question: With this law, and the front lines mentality, how did many people see psychological problems stemming form World War I such as PTSD? Were they treated under the law due to their mental condition, or were they glorified from the front-line mentality? Since PTSD wasn't first recognized until the 1980s, what was the common course of action for those with these issues from the NSDAP's perspective?

Did Russia become as big as it is now because they outnumbered their opponents, or did they just have good generals and claim empty land?

This week I have been mostly annoyed at the ancient Egyptians for not developing writing a few thousand years earlier than they did because they developed so much of their civilisation and culture without writing down how they did it. I wish we had something like the private diaries of the first nomads who began to settle down and organise a centralised State.

There are many, many other civilisations that did this of course, but the Egyptians developed an aesthetic that is just so iconic. Any school child could describe an Egyptian Pharaoh.