After about 2 months of no one looking at my tweets, I finally got a picture on the institutional account for my archives to go "viral" and get a bunch of retweets and favorites.

But of course the tweet had a typo in it. :(

I see comments here fairly regularly to the effect that a historian was "a product of his time" and his scholarship should be considered accordingly. Surely contemporary historians realize that they too are products of their time, but what do they think that means?

Or to put it another way, someday people will be saying, "remember, though, that this was written in 2015, and this historian was a product of his time." What sorts of things would you guess they will be talking about?

How do historians deal with satire? Or rather, how do scholars determine what's satirical and what's sincere within a single work?

To give a specific example, I came across a one-leaf English pamphlet from 1681, which likely means it was written during the last months of the Popish Plot hysteria. "The Character of a Jesuit" is an over-the-top litany of character traits, including my favorite: "He is the spurious Issue of the Whore of Babylon and Antichrist; he was Born in a Tempest, and brought up in a Wilderness; his Nurse was some Insatiate Bear, that mistook him for her Cubb, and afterwards licked the helpless Lump into her own Deform’d Nature."

I'm reasonably certain that the anonymous author is mocking Jesuits, but it occurred to me that he may also be mocking contemporary anti-Jesuit literature. By 1681, public opinion against the Jesuits and Catholics had lost a great deal of its rabidity relative to its height a couple years earlier.

A short piece of mine is up today on Aeon.co, trying to paint some answers to the question: "What options were there for the United States regarding the atomic bomb in 1945?". My goal here is to get away from seeing the options available at the time being between "exactly the way it played out" vs. "an imagined land invasion." There are many more variables that could have been tweaked, had it been seen desirable to do so.

I got into prehistoric archaeology at the university and will be starting next month! Soon I'll be one of you guys, a real pro who can answer questions instead of just asking them :b

Recently I read an essay about history that included the cliche "it's more complicated than commonly assumed." This drives me crazy, because that's true about everything. Or is it? Is there anything in your field of history that really is as simple as popularly assumed? Where if a historian wrote that "it was more complicated than that," you could point at them and thunder back "NO, IT ISN'T" for reasons other than an excuse to point and thunder?

I've posted some variant of this a couple of times; it deals with Puritan views on sex. I concede that it's fairly simplified, and I've only used it in response to default sub things that refer to Puritan sexual repression or prudishness (normally "Americans can't see boobs because of Puritan roots").

Problem is that I haven't really vetted it to any real extent outside of my own somewhat cursory research. I'm posting it here in the hopes that someone with more knowledge on the matter could either tell me if I'm wrong, if I'm right, or what I'm missing.

Did any generals or military thinkers in the 18th century and the Napoleonic wars ever express the concern that giving soldiers cover would exacerbate skulking?

For instance, was there a worry that a soldier behind a tree would be more likely to blind-fire their musket instead of aiming properly, or spend more time than usual reloading/pretending to reload?

u/Enrico_Dandolo what do you think of my new blog.

Reading up on Qing Chinese shipwrecked on Korean shores, vice versa, and also Ryukyuans shipwrecked on Korean shores and vice versa.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to teach a friend the importance of historical context? I discuss History with him sometimes and it's always the same thing, such and such a civilization/person was bad because they did some act contrary to modern morales, e.g. George Washington had slaves. Its a difficult thing to explain so I'd like to ask for a historians advice. Thanks in advance.

Don't you hate when you can't remember where you have read/seen something?

What was George III's daily schedule? Perhaps someone else has read it somewhere recently too, or (more likely) can wrangle google better than I can?

I found your info on Eunuchs from about a year ago by Google search. I'm a surgeon, and am looking for technical and physiological details. Yours is far more informative than Wikipedia, and mostly conforms with what I have already learned, despite the historical reticence to explicitly describe the procedure, or its consequences (remarkably, the absence of any reference to Islamic practices, despite their traffic in many thousands of eunuchs for many hundreds of years). You passingly mention a form of eunuchism, where the penis is removed, but the testes are retained intact. I had never found or even considered this variant, but it has significant practical possibilities. A Eunuch created pre-pubertally will never develop secondary male characteristics (deep voice, male chin, increased body hair, increased body size, increased muscular development, and increased competitiveness and aggressiveness). Some of these are very necessary to a military warrior. Muslims (Ottomans) used many of their eunuchoid slaves as warriors, where they would have been at a major disadvantage to larger, more muscular, and aggressive European warriors with good testosterone levels. Removal of the penis would have concentrated the minds of these warriors, while retention of the testicles would provide the necessary hormones. Any historical info on that? I started with the Wikipedia article, and I already know much more than I found, but am still eager to learn.