In the last 72 hours, I have written 12,000 words of answers on AskHistorians and haven't even started the second draft of the article I need to get done by the end of the month. I am procrastinating writing 6,000 words of history by writing twice that much about history somewhere else. I think I need a hobby...

Also, I'd like to share this entertaining tidbit I found sorting through some old research notes, from a document by a South African anti-apartheid campaign group discussing the impact racist residency policies had on black men in the 1970s:

Nowhere have these excesses been more apparent than in family life and sexual relations [...] perverse and undignified sexual behaviour between groups of men has become rampant among the young blacks [...] something which we have never before seen in their society

From a 21st century western perspective, it seems so funny and alarming to see someone basically saying "apartheid is so evil it makes black people gay! Gay!". Ah, the '70s...

It's rare to see historiography arguments in pop cultures, so I am delighted when such arguments arise in the recent Starcraft 2 expansion, Legacy of the Void.

A bit of background for those who are not familiar with Starcraft lore. Protoss is one of the playable races in the game. In the lore, the early history of Protoss is called as Aeon of Strife, where constant warfare between various tribes were the norm. At the end of Aeon of Strife, a Protoss mystic named Khas (re)discovered Khala, some sort of psionic, always-on super-Internet where a Protoss can share emphatic bond with other Protoss and foster communal society. Under his guidance, many Protoss learned how to bond with their fellow Protoss, thus help ending the Aeon of Strife, and restructured Protoss society to that based on caste system, dividing the society into 3 huge groups: the workers (Khalai), the warriors (Templar) and the statesman (Judicator).

However, not all Protoss really liked the idea of an always-on super-Internet, and refused to join the Khala. Conclave, the leaders of Judicator caste, kept their existence a secret, worrying that their idea might influence other Protoss and scatter the hard wrought peace brought by Khas' teachings. They ordered Adun, the leader of the Templar caste, to secretly eliminate those dissenters. He disobeyed the orders, falsifying their killings and helping them hide from the Conclave by teaching them ways to manipulate their latent psionic powers. However, without the discipline that come from learning the way of the Khala, some of the dissenters lost control of their powers, causing massive psionic storms across the planet. Shocked by the action of Adun, but reluctant to punish him and the Templar caste for fear exposing the existence of the dissenters, the Conclave made Adun and those that follows him swear an oath of silence, and make them transport the dissenters out of their home planet via an ancient spaceship. The dissenters would later called themselves Nerazim, but they're more often called by outsiders as Dark Templars.

In the current point of the storyline, Nerazim had reconcile with their brethren who banished them, and formed a new coalition called Daelaam, lead by Hierarch Artanis. In the latest expansion, the players meet Rohana, a Protoss preserver. A preserver is an advanced psionic user who holds memories of dead Protoss. For the case of Rohana, she had the memory of the Conclave during the time of Adun, and she had issues with the latest arrangement with the Nerazim. During her argument with Artanis, she believed Artanis didn't really understand the history of the Protoss, as he never had access of the memories and thoughts of those involved with the banishment of Nezarim, and hence she has superior view on historical matters. However, Artanis disagree, as he believed history should be seen, not though the eyes of those who lived through the events, but via the consequences of such events, even the long term one, and hence history is best left for those who lived in the present time, those who had to live through the consequence of those events and had better hindsight to decide their views on said events.

So what would various historians in /r/AskHistorians think? How would you react to a being who claimed they have better grasp on history because they can access and view history though the eyes of those who lived though the time of your study?

The other day, I received a FOIA response letter that began with the sentence any researcher dreads: "Records which may have been responsive to your request were destroyed ..."

The letter goes on to state that NARA might have associated records, and it gives two file numbers: 100-HQ-207565 and 100-SE-1608.

Does anyone know how to search NARA's database for specific files? It's a bit arcane to me.

Did anybody else notice that Pharrell drops a reference to medieval mystic Hermes Trismegistus in the latest Missy Elliot song? Just sayin'.

I posted a blog post today that tries to get at the trickiness in answering some questions about historical knowledge: When did the Allies know there wasn't a German bomb?

Once again, I am advertising /r/JewishHistory because I am a mindless shillbot.

Aside from that, I've been lucky enough to spend the week working with a former employee of Reprieve, a leading UK charity which provides legal representation for those facing the death penalty, torture or extrajudicial punishment around the world. He worked for the Death Penalty team. Some of the stories are sickening.

Anyone got any interesting information on Quaker psychiatric care? I was reading a bit about the York Quaker asylum and was wondering about how Quaker beliefs have influenced psychiatric care within Quaker communities outside of that famous example. I'd love some book recommendations!

Two things:

A) As usual, please consider checking us out over at /r/HistoryAnecdotes. I just posted a few submissions for the day, including a juicy one about a random homeless serf who gets mistaken for Baldwin IX and is crowned emperor!

B) Just wanted to say thank you to the flaired users, and anyone else, involved with compiling the excellent Books and Resources List. I've pulled my last dozen books off of that list, and I couldn't be happier with the quality of the material and the level of structure that my hobby has assumed. So thanks again!

Has anyone had any experience with part-time studying, particularly WRT an MA?

I've been trying to find comprehensive resources on sexuality and sexual behaviors of different cultures in different historical times for a while. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Something like this, only for cultures like greece, china, early americas, Victorian england, ancient mongola, india, anywhere and any time interesting, really would be great. I'm sure there isn't a catch all resource, but if anyone has any good references to interesting sexual history would be awesome be it books or online.

I've started a subreddit to compile these resources but it's pretty slim pickings online as far as I can tell :/

Is there any evidence that rich and powerful men from American history were involved with Bohemian Grove? Everything I can find about Bohemian Grove itself seems to be conspiracy oriented, and I can't even figure out if it is a real organization. Can somebody help me out?

Is there like a list somewhere of freely available documentaries that are considered to be actually historically accurate (and unbiased)? I'm asking because when I watch documentaries about stuff I have any kind of knowledge about, I often notice inaccuracies and misleading oversimplifications, and this makes me question anything else the documentary wants to tell me. For example, this map from the documentary China: A Century of Revolution shows Manchuria as part of the Empire of Japan in 1937 but not Korea, even though Korea was a protectorate while Manchuria was only controlled indirectly. I mean, how do you fuck this up? What's the point of maps if you can't get the simplest things straight? (Never mind that South Sakhalin is also missing.)

I also watched several documentaries about the Battle of Jylland with wildly different viewpoints on Jellicoe and the importance of torpedo boat screens, which is fine if it's said clearly that the stated opinions are conjecture. However if I had only watched one of these documentaries, I would have gotten very different impressions depending on which documentary I watched, because everything was presented rather matter-of-factly.

So I'm looking for documentaries that are generally considered to be adhering to a high standard of historical accuracy. You know, so I can learn stuff that is probably correct, rather than stuff that is probably incorrect. And since this subreddit seems more strict than other history related subs and I'm not just looking for good documentaries, but for accurate documentaries, I thought this might be a good place to ask.

Does anyone have a recommendation for an English-language book on canon law?

I came across this site of Ancient Egyptian Proverbs, but the work is uncited.
I'm looking for a large collection of ancient proverbs from any historical culture that is historically accurate. Thanks.
Perhaps from any time B.C.E.

I became skeptical of that list of proverbs when I read this one:

The key to all problems is the problem of consciousness.

It seems out of place that they would be that skeptical. Mind blowing for me if it's an accurate site.

Based on the current events in France, I feel like I need to read a solid biography of Charles Martel. Can anyone suggest a good book on the Carolingians that doesn't focus on Charlemagne?

I've been thinking about this sub's "no soapboxing" rule (which definitely makes sense if you want to have a not-shit sub): Do historians really try to remain morally and politically agnostic? It seems that the telling of history is a radically political act. In my home state of South Carolina (and frankly, all over America), the legacy/history of slavery and the Civil War is an ongoing political issue, for example.