Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, and has been insanely busy for me. Because of a story on the NUKEMAP in the Washington Post, literally dozens of other news websites have written articles of the "what would Hiroshima have been like if it happened here?," including the (in)famous IFLScience. As a result, yesterday some 250,000 unique visitors used the NUKEMAP, an all-time one-day high. (If you try to use it, and it doesn't connect, it is because the server can only deal with 1,400 or so users at any one moment. There are between 150 and 400 new connections per minute as I type this out.)

I also wrote a post on Were there alternatives to the atomic bombings? which attracted a lot of traffic.

I was also on NPR's Morning Edition, talking about why Hiroshima was chosen, and what motivated the scientists on the Targeting Committee (more than just ending that war, they hoped to end all wars).

I also was commissioned to write a piece for the Guardian: "Five ways that nuclear weapons could still be used". I've had some people comment that because it is a discrete and short list, it has kind of a Buzzfeed-style to it, but that wasn't really intentional on my part. (They did ask me to contemplate a fixed number of scenarios, and I thought that made a useful organizing device.)

Last, but certainly not least, just a few minutes ago my second posting for the New Yorker's Elements blog went online: Nagasaki: The Last Bomb. This is an experiment in form for me, in trying to tell this story in a somewhat different fashion than historians normally do, more descriptive than didactic, showing more than telling. I think, as I do say in the article (and have said before), that the Nagasaki bombing was something quite different than the Hiroshima one, both in its actual practice, and in its legacy. I think there is much about the Nagasaki mission which is not well-known and that most people, even most historians who know their way around WWII history, will find surprising.

So, I was thinking about the Civilization game series the other day. I'm a big fan, having played all of them (started with the original back in high school, pretty dedicated to IV, V is not my taste). So, they often get a bad rap from historians, including me, for being teleological: that is, they set out particular paths for the development of history, with essentially pre-determined endpoints. In the game, for instance, at some point you must either simply stop researching or adopt writing, industrialize, or whatever. The only paths that the game can imagine are those which occurred, and thus it eliminates contingency from history. This is historically problematic, though admittedly necessary for predictable gameplay.

Anyhow, in thinking about it more, I've come to the conclusion that if you consider the game from a meta-level, big-history perspective, it actually gets the teleology precisely backwards. See, the game starts every "civilization" at the same point: 4000 BCE, about to found their first city. Each civilization has two of a standard package of technologies, and the development paths of the next few thousand years are pretty well set out. Now, theoretically, the game directs everyone to the same endpoint, as I mentioned above, but at a practical level, the passage of time in the game actually opens up yawning gaps between the civilizations. It's a long-standing joke that galleons destroy battleships or chariots defeat tanks, but these situations happen because one or a few civilizations tend to dominate the game so thoroughly that they move along the tech tree much more quickly. As a result, by the mid- and later game, you have situations in which your modern infantry are assaulting cities defended by archers and spearmen. So, the overall pattern of the game is from similarity of starting point to difference in development.

I'd actually argue that that narrative is the reverse of world history. For one thing, cities do not emerge simultaneously around the world: there are thousands of years separating the adoption of agriculture and the later construction of urban areas in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, West Africa, central Mexico, Peru, and New Guinea (off the top of my head, those are the places we know agriculture and/or cities first appeared, right? I'm probably missing some). In fact, if we consider "culture" as a means to adapt to particular environments (among other things), then humanity was probably never so diverse as in the thousands of years up to and during the early adoptions of agriculture, because humans inhabited so many different environments and used so many different strategies to sustains themselves.

Since that point, there has been a broad trend of homogenization. Today, the overwhelming majority of people on earth share a key set of institutions: cereal-agriculture-based diets, national states, fossil-fuel industrialization, mass communication, gunpowder weapons. Although there are major power disparities between, say, the United States Marine Corps and the East Timor Defense Force, those are differences of degree. The East Timor military possesses the same kinds of weapons, drives around in trucks, serves a state that ostensibly represents a nation, and so on. It's not like the US runs around with "modern" weapons while the Timorese have swords and spears.

The real pattern of world history since the adoption of agriculture, then, is one of difference to sameness, NOT the sameness to difference pattern of the Civilization series. It's unfortunate that that is the deeper message of the narrative, since it really serves to justify and exaggerate the differences among peoples today, precisely when (I'd argue) our similarities are most important. Indeed, the Civilization series can be read as a kind of justification of contemporary power relationships. By telling the story that everyone started at the same point and assuming that now is the inevitable end of history, then whichever societies are most powerful today must have simply played the real-life version of Civilization better, and therefore they are mainly justified in being the most powerful societies. And, I suppose this helps explain why the "History" sections of Civ-centered message boards are fucking terrible.

It's still good fun, though, so I think I'll continue my game from last night. I'm playing as India and kicking ass, just wrapped up a conquest of the Koreans.

Better Know an Historian! After a lot of people did not return my calls about being the historian of the week, out of desperation I broke down and interviewed the least reliable person I know...

(going out to fetch some records from an organization so I'll be gone for the next 4 hrs, just in case anyone has burning eunuch questions they reply to me)

There's a lot of outrage over the trailer for the Stonewall film coming out this fall, saying that it's whitewashing LGBT history and downplays contributions of specific figures as well as racial minorities and trans women. The sources I try to read on this seem to conflict in several areas. Is there any one place where I can read the most accurate account of what happened leading up to and during the riots?

I am currently trading in school-related books I can do without (those not needed for studying for the boards), for invisible credit money that I will then use to buy history-related books on my extensive wishlist.

I'm addicted to books and, Amazon, oh Amazon, you make it so easy. You are the best dealer/supplier in the world.

I need more self control. And a new book shelf. But mostly more self control.

Having finished King Leopold's Ghosts, one thing that strikes me is just how weird the European colonial obsession with clothes was. All empires, granted, do impose some sort of similarity in dress in some way, but usually only those that directly affiliate themselves with it. For examples, only Roman citizens would ear the toga, and even there, only on certain occasions (art from the Near east, for example, will show elites dressed in Roman clothes for Roman situations and "native" clothes for "native" situations). It is really with colonial empires that you see the spectacle of forcing people in the tropics to wear trousers and long sleeved shirts, to considerably negative health effects, I might add.

This is despite the fact that, in most other respects, European colonial empires were remarkably non-integrative.

Since it is a free for all and thus the 20 year rule doesn't really apply, what are some historians' thoughts on the ongoing Syrian Civil War/Iraqi War?

Obviously a lot is yet to happen and speculation is the only thing to assert. What will likely be the ramifications of these conflicts? What happens to the remnants of the Syrian government? Prosecution for war crimes (chemical weapons usage)? Kurdish statehood efforts gain credibility? Even more devastating power vacuum?

Can I ask other historians what sort of crazy material stuff you've seen fall out of the folios in archives? Something along the lines of this? I've never found anything quite so dramatic, but I've really enjoyed finding pressed flowers and love tokens inside archived correspondence. It makes otherwise dreary archival work so much more exciting--and it reminds you that the people whose letters you are reading were very real people with very real, material lives.

I'm reading Mark Elvin's The Retreat of the Elephants, an environmental history of China up to the 20th century. It's a different kind of history book because it's VERY heavy with primary sources, often in long, multi-page quotes. These include passages from gazetteers and other government produced documents, travelers' accounts, and innumerable poems, since poetry-writing was an important pastime for the imperial elite. It doesn't make it a particularly easy read, but it does absolutely give a lot of flavor to the text. Plus, some of the passages are long enough that one could use them in classroom exercises, and that's always a plus.

I had this weird dream last night in which I see academic historians on Chinese history having an academic slap-fight in published books. I don't remember what the topic was, exactly, but I remember opening different books in a library and seeing the slap-fight.

Then I dreamed about how I became a community exercise officer or something simply by running a mile, then walking up gigantic hills at my elementary school campus and across a wooden bridge that I swear would always collapse with my best friend heading home, even though we didn't even live in the same direction.

My dreams are weird. I think this means I need to read more articles.

Anyone ever been moved to extreme emotions by historical writing? Reread Hew Strachan's The First World War this past week and the final chapter, on the conclusion of the war, had me a little misty-eyed. The man found just the right words to conclude the story of the War.

Ok, for the next round of "name the artifact":

https://connellysunleashed.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/p1060297.jpg?w=640&h=480

(Note: the location miiiiiiiiight not be where you'd expect it to be completely).

If you were given creative control of a documentary series on the history of human civilization and an unlimited budget, what would you go out of your way to include?

85 years ago today, three black men were lynched in the town of Marion, Indiana based on allegations of rape and murder. The Ku Klux Klan was involved in the lynching, which drew large crowds. One of the victims, James Cameron, survived the ordeal and went on to create the American Black Holocaust Museum.

WARNING: IMAGE OF HANGED LYNCHING VICTIMS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Shipp_and_Abram_Smith

When do we bring back the artifact game?