Just a random reflection about how lucky we are in the US to have the Library of Congress.

A few months back I was scanning some documents there when another researcher went to the scanner next to me and started copying a leather bound manuscript, page by page.

We both stand there for a while before I make conversation and ask him what he is scanning.

Turns out that there was a Spanish Jesuit who wrote a chronicle in Chile in the 17th century. According to him, researchers in Chile had been scouring the Earth for a copy of it without luck. The one in D.C. seems to be the only surviving copy.

The Chileans didn't have enough money to come to the US and scan it themselves so they asked this guy, who was from Mexico but teaching in the US, to do them a favor and scan it.

He gave me his card. I think I'll write him this week to ask if there had been any major revelations thanks to his efforts.

The popular, heroic version of J. Robert Oppenheimer is as a cool, confident, charismatic genius. The reality was a much more complex and fractured man. As a good friend of his put it, Oppenheimer was "a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters." I wrote a short blog post of meditations on Oppenheimer's many identities, and the way in which they shaped his work on the bomb and what eventually happened to him: The doubts of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Did some work in the manuscripts at the University of Cape Town today...and ran into new barricades on the way out. Yep, the protest marches are starting again (not as strongly as before). So I ended up walking a pretty good distance to catch a minibus. Still, I got to see the microfilms I wanted.

I gave a talk yesterday evening for Trigsurvey on history of surveying, and went way too long but apparently it was all right (though I felt kind of like I was barely holding the lid on a volcano of information). Besides, the geomatics institute brings beer for refreshments, so it was all good for that lot. Had some interesting conversations with practicing land surveyors, which I enjoyed. Also, free Institute of Land Surveyors tie!

Otherwise I'm going into my shortened final week in South Africa. I'm now well over 22,000 images collected, and a lot of great documents, but it's a real dog's breakfast because my actual quarry was the National Archives of Zimbabwe. No clearance yet. We're shooting for early next year to try to get there. Sigh.

Another plug for /r/HistoryAnecdotes!

Please check us out. We are small and need love.

All other things being equal (e.g., location of raw materials), which one is easier to build, a pyramid or a ziggurat? Assume roughly equal size.

Hi. plugging /r/JewishHistory because I'm a shameless self promoter. Also, anyone got some recommendations on Highland Travellers? I know a tiny bit about Irish travellers but didn't know Highland Travellers had ever existed until a few months back, and searching on Amazon etc hasn't been helpful.

I guess this is a "humble brag" in a way, but hopefully it's interesting.

A couple years back, I had the pleasure of interning in the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. As an enthusiastic amateur numismatist, this is a dream come true.

At any rate, in the vaults they had the entirety of “The Richmond Horde” – the famous/infamous and massive collection of Confederate currency that was confiscated by Union troops from Richmond after the US Civil War. Tens of thousands of bills, many incredibly rare types, in every imaginable condition. Some were cancelled but had never been destroyed, some were pinned together with sewing pins, or had been pasted to newspaper backings by CSA residents, desperately and patriotically trying to keep their version of a nation together. The really cool thing is, this horde was long thought by many numismatists to have been destroyed a century ago or more – it wasn’t broad public knowledge that it survived. At the time I got to work with it, helping pick notes that would go on display and be catalogued, I was on the tail end of a decades-long effort to individually examine every single note and assess them for the collection. It was quite a feeling to be sitting there holding in my hands a thing that people on internet forums in front of me were confidently telling each other no longer existed.

I’ve never been especially interested in Confederate money, because of what the CSA stood for, but from a strictly academic perspective it was amazing. I got to do awesome things with some other incredible items – carrying around boxes with 10 or 20 million dollars worth of rare old gold coins, handling the nearly 1900 year old Chinese paper notes that are the first paper currency in history (made just a couple decades after paper itself was invented) etc – but nothing that was on the sheer scale of that horde.

How has Ataturk's cult of personality managed to withstand the test of time?

Anyone recommend a book about or even heard of any Russian soldier having fought all the way from 1941-45?

History of Islam podcast coming soon, need your help to choose the cover art.

http://historyofislampodcast.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/cover-art-final-vote.html

I watched Bridge of Spies last night. The film opens with "1957 at the height of the cold war". But I've also heard 1962 (Cuban Missile Crisis) and 1983 (Able Archer) both described as "the height of the cold war".

When was the actual height? Was there ever actually a height at all?

I've been reading a bunch of Gerrard Winstanley's pamphlets, and I've fallen in love with this guy. He presents a very nuanced and original understanding of divinity, which he believes permeates all of creation. For Winstanley, divinity is not an outward being, but a force that resides in all living creatures. Because his divinity is internal, he names it "Reason" or "universal Love", and argues that knowing and submitting to it by actively living in Love and Reason will create paradise on earth.

As well, he understands the Fall of Man not as a historical event, but as a continuous process that prevents humanity from achieving paradise. He argues that the Fall is actually a state of being and behaviour; self-love, covetousness and greed drives humanity from the metaphorical Garden of Eden. This is connected to his critique of "kingly power" that exists in political, economic and social spheres. Winstanley believes that covetousness is the root of all "kingly power", because it requires men to make themselves tyrants over their "fellow creatures" to satisfy themselves. Therefore, Winstanley asserts that to destroy oppression and hierarchy, men and women of all nations (a pretty radical thought for 17th century England!) should actively pursue a non-violent revolution by cultivating unused wastelands in egalitarian communes which will root out covetousness.

When's the most recent general survey of Chinese history, suitable for classroom use? I have to use Fairbank's China: A New History, and while it's by no means bad (making it onto the AskHistorians booklist is just the most immediate testament to its quality), it seems to me like there's a lot of room to accompany the treasure trove of new scholarship that's come out since 1992.

Hey guys, I'm learning about cuisine and eating habits of people in medieval Western and Central Europe, concentrating towards England.

Does anyone have questions about cuisine and food at the period? (To help get those brain juices flowing).

I'm just started reading Dostoevsky's Demons and he mentions a few real people Chaadaev, Belinsky, Gradovsky and Herzen and in the notes it describes a few of these guys as Liberal. Did liberal in Dostoevsky's time in Russia mean the same thing it does today?

Don't bother with Jay Barbree's Neil Armstrong biography. His writing cannot possibly be mistaken for dispassionate and contains basic errors. For instance, he writes that Tom Stafford test MIGs sent by Israel at Area 51; Area 51 did test MIGs on loan from Israel but the Air Force had Stafford on loan to NASA, at the time - I'll hazard a guess that NASA didn't secretly loan him back in the middle of his Apollo 10 training.

Doing some shilling for /r/JoinOrDie, a brand new sub dedicated to the American Revolution. Turns out there isn't any sub reddit dedicated to the topic--or at least there wasn't until a few days ago.

Can anyone tell me why democrats I talk to on social media are saying that the parties did a "switcheroo" sometime after the civil war? I haven't found any evidence of this when I did a search, but maybe I was searching in the wrong places. Thanks.

The John Lewis Christmas advert is depressing. Even if he gets a telescope, he can't talk to anyone. He's stuck millions of miles away and now he can see exactly what he's missing, which is even worse.