Hello from Atlanta!

I'm sure anyone who's found this thread has already found the META from yesterday with our presentations and thus know exactly how the BIG EVENT of the Conference (from our perspective) went. We had the pleasure of meeting a couple flairs and former flairs who were in attendance, and I gather from comments elsewhere on AH that a few others in the audience were also subscribers who did not stop to say hi. Our presentation was tweeted by Eric G.E. Zeulow and several of the mods had an opportunity to talk with him during a public reception later that night. We were also joined by two more mods, /u/Jasfss and /u/Caffarelli, which was the first time some of us had met. I can now confirm that this group seems quite normal and respectable, though I make no such claims about /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov, who was not in attendance.

We did also talk to a number of other people at the reception and seem to have generated a fair bit of interest in our little forum here. We have business cards for the modteam and they are flying around.

I myself recently came back from attending my first presentation, which was titled "Indigenous Counter-Mapping: The Use of GIS, Geovisualizations and Historical Maps to Reconstruct Indigenous Perspectives and History.

It was pretty interesting, particularly the various uses of technology the presenters were using in their work to do things like map the amount of Spanish knowledge of the Inca empire compared to the actual scope of it and what can be known from Inca and other indigenous sources about the march to Cuzco and how much assistance Pizarro's men truly had. The second presentation was very interesting to me, personally, as it heavily echos the area I now work in. This presenter was talking about oral histories and decolonizing maps and technology to, for instance, re-establish indigenous place names and reconstruct the cultural memory of the experience of the Trail of Tears. Her passion was evident as she talked about her own experiences as a member of the Cherokee Nation. The third presenter was talking about the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) and how it shapes the application process for UNESCO designation and, also, how states can approach integrating indigenous knowledge and perspectives in their presentation of history. He also spoke of a particular Kiowa map and the way in which certain details were recorded, that sometimes revealed "easier to read" details than the hashes and shadings Europeans used to indicate stone type.

With that I'll leave you. Everyone is enjoying themselves and there's really quite an overwhelming amount to see and do here. I'm on Reddit typing because I'm a compulsive journaller and have to record things somehow, so hopefully some of you enjoy it.

Good day to All! I'm currently a Library Archivist at a University in Louisiana and I'm conducting a short 10 question Survey on your feelings of your own History, Lineage, and Slavery. I'm hoping to compile the data and include it in a Paper/Presentation at a conference in Texas during the Summer. Your answers are completely anonymous and you're not required to give any personal information.

Please feel free to take this Survey through SurveyMonkey and let me know what you think!

Thanks Reddit for Helping Out A Scholar!!

The North Korean nuclear test has kept me moderately busy. Had some discussion on the many definitions of "hydrogen bomb" with Business Insider. Currently working on a brief article/post about an interesting historical analog (disputes over another "hydrogen bomb" claim).

UPDATE: My piece is up!

In our previous topic about the books we had read this past year I said that I was reading The Archaeology of West and Northwestern Mesoamerica (1985) edited by Michael Foster and Phil Weigand. I've read more of it on my flight home from visiting my parents and one of the chapters really stood out for me. The chapter was written by Isabel Kelly and pertained to gold and silver objects in Colima. Kelly had been working in Colima for over 40 years before she wrote this chapter, so she had a lot to draw from. Most of the gold and silver artifacts were looted from some cemeteries from a site called El Chanal in 1964 before Mexico implemented their antiquities laws. Fortunately for Kelly she was on good terms with many of the looters and were able to draw some objects. Many of the objects also ended up being purchased by the Heye Foundation which she was also able to obtain photographs of the objects in order to draw.

Now you may be wondering, why all this background about such a silly chapter? It's because the objects Kelly recorded were stylistically more similar to other regions. So similar that others may have mistakenly attributed them to other cultures because they were unfamiliar with Colima's style. Now Kelly had mostly dealt with the shaft tomb culture which predated the metallurgical introduction to Mesoamerica. Nonetheless she was able to identify an L-shape serpent figure as being the fire serpent representation of Huehueteotl, the old fire god known elsewhere in Mesoamerica. And being able to identify a deity in West Mexico is kind of a big deal.

After reading this I am left with so many questions. Were these objects produced within Colima or were they traded? If they were made in Colima, from who are they getting this stylistic style from? Is from Central Mexico and the "Toltecs" or from Puebla-Oaxaca area and the Mixtecs? Why is there such an abundance of gold and silver objects at El Chanal, but not at other Epiclassic and Postclassic sites within Colima? And why the fuck has no one bothered to return to El Chanel to try and find some unlooted burials?

Kelly's chapter if anyone is intereted

Similar objects to the L-shaped serpent Kelly drew, but they are attributed to the Aztec or Toltec

http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/310648

http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/313344

Has anyone read Mein Kampf and, from a literature point of view, how good is it?

Hello from the mods at /r/JihadInFocus!

We are a subreddit dedicated to the aggregation of historic, sociological, and news related aspects of 'Jihadism.' (Although we are not a 'War Updates' subreddit.) We have no place for trolling shenanigans, which I think all of you can sympathize with.

Although it's not necessarily topical, I am confident that many on this subreddit would find it informative and worthwhile. I've always seen /r/AskHistorians as a refuge for informed and civil discussion on reddit, and it's made me a fan. We at /r/JihadInFocus hope to build a similar culture of amicable knowledge there. I think we have at least a minor philosophical alliance.

Although we are new, we are growing pretty quickly. And we would love for you to be a part of our new community. So come on down and participate. And please, bring that sweet sweet history.

Edit: Special thanks to the mods for letting us spam their FFA friday thread and generally communicating with us.

Giving myself about a year and a half to learn Latin to a level suitable enough to be able to do a masters degree translating old Mathematical Texts from Latin into English, as well as annotating and explaining them. Is that a suitable amount of time to learn Latin (I will also be continuing to learn during the degree) and anyone got any resources to help me learn Latin?

During WWII, was there evidence of people burning the draft records, like done during the Vietnam War?

Is there a point in time where a historian's research crosses over from historical to anthropological?

In other words, say two centuries before Utnapishtim witnessed the flood in Mesopotamia, humans in that region had not yet begun to develop an sustainable farming system, let alone a written alphabet.

To study the antediluvian society then, the historian really becomes an archeologist/anthropologist/historian. (My example is over the top. I'm sorry, but I'm a 20th Century scholar but Gilgamesh was the only reference that comes to mind.)

By anthropology, I mean beyond the inherent properties of the science that we use to place events in proper context for their time.

Has anyone encountered this? What challenges do historians in this situation face?

With Cuba in the news a lot lately it has really been bugging me to see that despite tons of legitimate (and extremely serious) gripes about the governments of Fidel and Raul Castro, tons of self-proclaimed experts online are still circulating myths.

A few months ago a post on Imgur went viral saying that there were, among other things, mandatory abortions, and when asked for sources the OP did a new post where he cited, I kid you not, an anonymous response from answers.com, among his sources. None of said sources, of course, even referred to the crazy stuff that he was posting, instead just being badly sourced "Castro bad" rants from blogs and the like.

I really wish more people would read some serious critical sources and actually visit the island before they believe half the stuff that is out there. Of course, I also mean this the other way around: Before you believe the positive propaganda, visit everyday Cubans living there and read serious, critical, academics who will be more than happy to point out the darker side of the Revolution.

Alright, this is a goofy question that probably doesn't need its own designated thread.

You've been selected to travel back in time. As the machine warms up, you spill your bottle of Code Red on the controls, and it goes haywire.

You've traveled back to a time period outside of your specialization, one where you don't even know the language. Let's say that this is still within human history, this isn't a question about survival; and pre-20th Century, cause if you can catch a flight back home to 1970s US, it's not really that difficult, and you can make a killing on Microsoft stock. The time machine's broken, you're not ever going back.

What do you know as a historian in terms of methodology that would make you more likely to get by than a non-historian?

Didn't get much work done on my dissertation this week either, but that was because I was getting ready for my new desktop computer to come in. Now that it's finally arrived, and working very well, hopefully that should speed things up a bit around here :D