May I use this occasion to pay my humble tribute to /u/kieslowskifan , please?

Dear Sir/Madam, I wish to convey my deepest thanks for all your contributions to /r/AskHistorians . I have learned a lot from your posts and I really appreciate the level of depth, information, and courtesy in each one of your posts.

If appropriate, I wish to light some incense in your honor. Please let me know your preferred scent.

Sincerely, /u/itsalrightwithme

My book is finally, properly out and some people have it and they tell me they like it and it's #20 in Textile & Costume on Amazon.

*rolls around on the floor in joy*

Unfortunately, I don't think the publisher sent review copies to the bloggers I recommended, but maybe somebody will decide on their own to review it soon, I don't know, I'm just desperate and flailing. Maybe my own copy will arrive one of these days, maybe.

Other things: I'm having another meeting to deaccession artifacts, this time just clothes. All except about three aren't just found in collections, they were found in collections in 1983 and never done anything with. Which makes it very easy! Sadly, we have not yet done anything with the previous bunch of deaccessions, so this is probably going to get added to the pile of stuff taking up space. But as unaccessioned items, they are certainly easier to deal with than accessioned ones (so "deaccession" is the wrong word).

I am working on a grant for about $1700 to buy two dress forms - yes, they are over $800 apiece - and I really hope we get it. What is life if I cannot dress up life-size dolls? I mean educate the public on historic material culture?

I just submitted my thesis to my committee chair. Well, re-submitted, actually, since it's already been through one revision. I'm sure it's going to come back with loads more revisions, but I BLOODY DID IT.

It's only 9:30 a.m. here and I think I deserve a celebratory cocktail.

A few weeks ago, I was going to talk about the goals of Peoples Temple, but life got busy and homework piled up, so I had to go tackle that first. I still want to talk about the goals of Peoples Temple, but I think I want to put that aside for a bit and revisit the discussion about the public memory of Jonestown and of Peoples Temple. Last time we had a chat, we had a discussion about an idiom that's oft repeated when we want to talk about someone who uncritically accepts and devotes their whole lives to an idea/organization/person—the cultist. Today, the discussion will be about images, namely, what people imagine first when they think of Jonestown or Peoples Temple (that is, if they remember it at all).

If you do a Google image search for “Jonestown”, most of the first images you're going to get are images of dead bodies, the majority of them lying face down, in colorful clothing. There are aerial shots of dead bodies surrounding the roofed pavilion, there are ground shots of dead bodies near the pavilion, there's more pictures of dead bodies alongside a road, and there's a picture of what looks to be a family holding each other's shoulders and embracing a dead child as they lie face down on the ground. Some of the pictures are juxtaposed with a picture of Jim Jones or with headlines proclaiming “Mass Suicides of Guyana Cult” and “Cult Leader Found Dead”, a picture of the syringes, a picture of the vat filled with purple liquid (which happened to be the cover photo Time Magazine used when talking about the deaths). There's a search option for “kool aid”, a search option for “children”, and even a search option for “Jim Jones body” (complete with a graphic thumbnail image!).

Similarly, many of the first images when you search “Peoples Temple” consist of pictures of dead bodies. This time, you also get to see a picture of the Peoples Temple sign listing sessions, some of Jim Jones preaching to his congregation, a picture of the church building, a few pictures of Jonestown members on the morning of the last day. But there's always that image of dead bodies lying there in the jungle, and the first suggested option (at least on my screen) is “bodies”.

Ultimately, what you get is death, cult, mass suicide, massacre, brainwashing, dead bodies, dead bodies, and dead bodies. Here and there, you might get to see the Jonestown buildings before the mass deaths of 18 November 1978, a picture of smiling children, a picture of the welcome sign. But the idea you get about Jonestown and Peoples Temple is death and dead bodies, and all because of one man: Jim Jones.

I have to confess something about myself. I have a bias. I've always been interested about people, especially when it comes to people who are depicted as passive agents acted upon and who are often not given a voice of their own in the historical record. I don't subscribe to the idea that history is centered around a few great actors (who are predominately white men). I also don't subscribe to the idea that people just passively allowed themselves to be acted on by these great actors. In the case of Jonestown and Peoples Temple, I do not subscribe to the idea that the story begins and ends with Jim Jones. Obviously, he plays a central part of the story, and there's no point in denying that he plays that central of a role. To go the other way and claim that Jim Jones was not at all important to history is fallacious and equally wrong. Nevertheless, when looking at popular scholarship regarding Peoples Temple, the impression one gets is that Jim Jones is the entire story, the puppet master who manipulated dumb sheep to the poisoned vat and had them drink from it and die. The story having been thus reduced, the members of Peoples Temple who died that day (majority black, majority women) are dehumanized, shrugged off as passive agents being acted on rather than active agents making choices within a larger historical, societal, and cultural context. By reducing these people as dead bodies, we deny them their humanity, and we forget that they were people who had motivations and goals and hopes and dreams and beliefs of their own. This strikes me as wrong. The story of Jonestown is not as simplistic as “one man conned a bunch of other people to die”.

So, I guess you can say that my ultimate motive as an amateur researcher of history is to challenge that simplistic story.

Back to the point. Popular memory has essentially been stuck at the stage where the world centers around Jim Jones and where it begins and ends 18 November 1978. This is very clear with “drinking the kool-aid”, and this is equally just as clear from the Google image results. Meanwhile, the historiography of Jonestown research has moved on, to discuss the motivations of the members, to discuss the context of Peoples Temple and its rise, and to discuss the context that led to the movement's downfall.

If we want to tell the story in full, we have to talk about the entire story: not just 18 November, not just Jim Jones, and not just “oh, they were just brainwashed members of a cult”. We can't allow ourselves to be content with cultural amnesia, nor can we disassociate Peoples Temple from Californian history and US history and Guyana history and black history and history of religion.

Next time we meet, we can talk about Peoples Temple.

• Picturing Jonestown: Visual Media and the Social Construction of History
• A Brief and General Overview of Jonestown Historiography

I wrote up a blog post earlier this week about being a historical consultant to a television show based in historical fiction (sort of an alternate-timeline of the Manhattan Project), Manhattan. I am going to be doing some more posts about the show (specifically talking about some of the lesser-known historical antecedents of the events shown on the show), for those who are interested. It has been a fun gig and for me a real eye-opener into how historical consulting ought to work (as opposed to how it probably does work most of the time), in terms of when to bring the experts in, how to use them effectively, and how to use historical facts even when you are explicitly making a work of fiction (or neo-noir science-fiction, as I think of Manhattan).

This is extremely stupid, but maybe someone else will get a smile out of it. One amusing treat of working through 18th century letters for me is how musicians and composers constantly refer to their patrons as "adorable sovereign." This was just apparently a normal stock phrase you used. So now you know the proper way to refer to your king in the 18th century, he's a big sweetie, pinch his cheeks. I always mean to look up when "adorable" went from "worthy of adoration" to "wow so cute" but I never do it. Also maybe it's better to preserve the mystique a little.

So I want to offer my compliments to academics and scholars here for a minute.

Earlier this week I sent out a few emails to some prominent academics in my field, soliciting advise and anything they could offer to help me along with my thesis. I didn't expect much of a reply, but figured I had nothing to lose. Well of the 6 I initially emailed all but 1 have replied, and their responses were better than I imagined (I'm not going to divulge who I talked with, but anyone who has any idea about the Caucasus probably has an idea of who it was; its not exactly a big field of study).

One scholar suggested I go and meet up with him while we are both in the region next month, which I'm looking at seriously doing, to get some better information and so forth. Another sent me his PhD dissertation, which is related to my research, and a copy of one of his books (which as he noted, some fine folks had "helpfully uploaded"; its an academic book retailing somewhere around $250 I believe), and suggested I contact a student of his, who is in the region and knows some people (he too has replied to my messages). A third one knows some government officials within the Georgian government, at the ministerial level, and gave me their personal emails and said to use his name in contacting them.

Overall I couldn't be happier with the results of what is effectively cold-calling some academics, whom I suspect are largely busy with their own work and don't really need another student tagging along. So I just want to pass along my thanks to the larger community, and let anyone here who is at that level to know their efforts are much appreciated.

Learned about this app today called Pok Ta Pok. It let's you play the Mesoamerican ballgame against a computer opponent. You can play it on iOS and Android. I wonder if there will be any Guachimontones DLC in the future

http://www.poktapokgames.com/

I was poking through Carl Lumholtz's book Unknown Mexico yesterday. Lumholtz had travelled to Mexico in the late 1890s and recorded what he saw of native groups and what artifacts he collected. A picture of a Tarascan merchant stood out to me. It stood out to me because I have seen shaft tomb figures depicting a similar kind of person loaded with jars. To me it seems reasonable to assume that the figures from Colima showing people carrying jars are merchants. And coupled with Lumholtz's description of the merchants travelling months at a time from coastal areas (like Colima) to the highlands carrying goods in their jars reinforces that idea. And carrying large burdens is not an unknown activity elsewhere in Mesoamerica. They just are not depicted carrying jars.

I'm being driven crazy by the freaking book "1421." If I have to refute that book one more time, I think I will strangle someone.

I actually got the first words down on my dissertation today! Granted, I'm currently more outlining than anything else, but still, it feels like I've broken ground. I wrote 1000 words, which would probably be about 1% of the actual dissertation...if I keep up that pace I'd have a draft done in one hundred days. Not too shabby :D

I gotta admit, even a task as seemingly daunting as one's dissertation seems doable when you actually start getting to work on it :D It feels like I've received the mid-season upgrade in one of those shonen/mecha animes!

Can't believe I am already at the half of this semester at university ... this week was hard...

Be sure to check out /r/HistoryAnecdotes if you haven't already! :D

I'm starting a History of Islam podcast, inspired by Mike Dincan's History of Rom of Podcast.

I'm launching it early november... What do you guys think will be the best place to post updates on it twitter/fb/subreddit/blog????

Any other advice or suggestion from those of you who listen to podcasts is appreciated

Have a good weekend!

I'm doing some amateur research for a friend, trying to trace the history of a cartoon (alleged to have been) used in the production of Medieval tapestries. The cartoon has this writing on the back:

Le Carton acheté à Paris chez Auvray graveur provenoit d'une galerie d'Italie et portoit le Nº 48.

https://i.imgur.com/JMPd0Ix.jpg

I've been told that a graveur in Paris would have sold all kinds of prints and paper-based ephemera, which could have included cartoons like this. With the era unknown, how would you go about tracing an engraver in Paris named Auvray or Auvraij? Is there just not enough information in here to be able to do it?

It's hard to see how the purchase in Paris would fit the provenance claimed by the Belgian family who have owned this for several generations, who believe that a 19th century ancestor purchased this in Italy when serving there as diplomat.

This week I finished up Playing at the World by Jon Peterson. It was a fascinating look into the history of Dungeons and Dragons. It looked at the Chess variants that lead to Prussian war games which lead to miniature figure games which lead to the scale of games shrinking from entire units to an eventual 1:1 scale. It also covered the core concepts of the game and where they drew inspiration from like progression, endurance, avoidance, polyhedral dice, etc. It also went into the sci-fi and fantasy writing that inspired the setting. It goes into a whole lot more. All the pieces that came together to make D&D was mind blowing to me. Highly recommend it if table top gaming interests you.

I also just started reading At Day's Close Night in Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch. A history of night time seems fascinating. I'm also drawn to the technical side of lights, lamps, torches, etc. I hope it scratches that itch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8vdYPOpO-g

Really interesting lecture from Dr. Tonio Andrade about the interaction and exchange of gunpowder technology and technique between Europe and East Asia, as a forerunner to a book that comes out in January.

How united was the Holy Roman Empire a few years before Napoleon effectively ended it? If I were to go from early 19th century Prussia to Bavaria, etc., would I see elements of the Holy Roman Empire present there?

Has there ever been an /r/AskHistorians meet-up? Y'all are a group of people I'd actually be happy to leave my hobbit hole to hang out with.

Does anyone have insight into how accurate the Flashman Papers are in regards to the personalities of historical figures? I trust his footnote research, but I don't know how much artistic license he put into how the various Maharanis, generals, etc. carried themselves day to day.

I posted this as a question a few days ago with no response. If the the flood account in Genesis was an adaptation of the Mesopotamian Flood myths involving Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis, then I think that points to the Garden of Eden creation account in Genesis being an adaptation of the Mesopotamian Huluppu Tree myth involving Gilgamesh and Inanna (Ishtar.) I was researching Lilith for a research paper and was really struck by the similarities between the Huluppu Tree story and the Garden of Eden creation account. They are especially similar if you believe that Lilith was the Serpent in Eden because Lilith and a serpent refused to leave Inanna's Huluppu Tree until Gilgamesh drove them away. I honestly want somebody to tell me if I'm right or wrong here, I also have some crack pot theories about Lilith that are driving me bonkers too.

I find it interesting that so many ancient texts, documents, books, etc. always get "discovered" in archives. I mean if it was stored somewhere in an archive then some historian already found it and put it there for storage, right?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/books/earliest-known-draft-of-king-james-bible-is-found-scholar-says.html

Just left Bridge of Spies. Walked out on it, actually. It's a dreadful movie.

Wondering if anyone can recommend some good books on the history of Scandinavia? The Dano-Swedish struggles in particular.