I am now officially a Doctor! I had my Viva (my college's fancy term for a thesis defense) yesterday afternoon and I passed with minuscule corrections (actually passed with minor corrections, as the types of pass my college allows are really limited, but my examiners wanted to emphasise how minor the changes were). Overall it was a pretty painless experience, we talked a lot about my methodology and why I had chosen to emphasize certain topics and not others. It was much better than I expected, but I'm also perfectly happy to only do it once.

After passing I celebrated as any responsible doctor would, by drinking until midnight and then sleeping for 11 hours. Today I am remarkably not hungover, which is a real plus.

For the last couple of years I've been working with the British Library on a project that aims to create an online archive of one million Victorian jokes. We've been experimenting with ways to extract jokes from existing databases of 19th century books and newspapers, and with techniques for annotating them with new metadata (characters, subjects, locations, etc). We've made steady progress and I hope we'll have something to show for it later this year.

In the meantime, however, we've started sharing some of the jokes on social media. Our twitter account (@VictorianHumour) has now 'told' more than 200 Victorian jokes. They're pretty dreadful, of course, but I'm a sucker for tortured puns and clunky one-liners.

This week, we decided to expand to other social media platforms. I haven't figured out how the best way to post to Reddit, but you can get your daily fix of historical humour on:

• Twitter: @VictorianHumour
• Facebook: facebook.com/VictorianHumour
• Tumblr: victorianhumour.tumblr.com
• Pinterest: pinterest.com/victorianhumour
• Instagram: instagram.com/victorianhumour

The twitter account has a much larger back catalogue, but they'll all receive the same daily update from now on. If you like terrible jokes, please consider following one of the accounts and inflicting the worst gags on your unsuspecting friends and family!

So for the last week or so I've been researching the awards earned by the various US infantry divisions of WWII, and came upon an interesting tidbit: Air Medals. Now, you would think the criteria to earn an Air Medal wouldn't apply if you served in an infantry division, but they in fact do; the division's artillery spotter planes.

The criteria for one award of the Air Medal are as follows:

• Per twenty-five (25) operational flights during which exposure to enemy fire is probable and expected.

• Per one-hundred (100) operational flights during which exposure to enemy fire is not expected.

The Germans initially thought these little planes were harmless. They later turned out to be disastrously wrong when artillery shells dropped right into their laps! They soon began firing on the spotter planes at any chance they could get.

In each division's artillery brigade there was a headquarters and four battalions; three 105 mm howitzer battalions and one 155 mm howitzer battalion The M5 tractor replaced the CCKW in the 105 mm battalions as soon as enough tractors were available*

The artillery brigade headquarters had two "Airplane, Liaison", and each battalion headquarters also had two, giving each infantry division a total of ten.

Each division maintained its own "airfield" (I use this term nicely), and spotter planes were sent up regularly to look for targets, each pilot usually flying at least twice a day. This gave opportunities for the ten divisional pilots to cumulatively earn upwards of a hundred Air Medals through the course of the war; the 1st Infantry Division got 76, the 30th Infantry Division 174.

Sources:

A Liaison Pilot's Life During Combat, by Larry Genebach (US Army Military Police School, Department of General Subjects)

*I just can't help myself; vehicles are another one of my interests. Before the Mack NO arrived in late 1943, battalions were forced to use crawler tractors to move their larger pieces. The Mack NO was also a substitute until enough M4 and M5 tractors could be produced. Likewise the M33 (turretless M3 Lee), M34 (turretless M32B1 ARV), and M35 (turretless M10 TD) prime movers were substitutes until enough M6 heavy tractors arrived.

By the end of the war, most, but not all, truck-drawn artillery battalions had converted to the various tractors. Tractors always seemed to be in short supply, however, and the CCKW, Mack NO, and M33, 34, and 35 were used until the end of the war in some cases.

So this whole 'ancient Greek laptop art piece' thing has been hitting social media. Conspiracy theories about time travel and aliens and all that are all well and good, but I think we're missing the important things here:

What kind of OS were the ancient Greeks using, and how did they browse dank Hellenistic memes?

I just found this subreddit and got lost in one of your excellent and well researched threads. Just wanted to say thank you for taking the (what I'm sure is tons of) time to moderate the racist or ridiculous comments so that any and all controversial topics remain scholarly and interesting to read.

On a more serious note, today marks the 121st 'birthday' (day of commissioning, to be more precise) of the USS Olympia, the flagship of Commodore Dewey during the Battle of Manila Bay. She has, in recent years, become a bit of a controversial topic regarding her preservation and the costs that come with it. However, she holds a special place, along with the Russian cruiser Aurora, as a living monument to a past age of steel hulls.

I'm not one to 'plug' things on this subreddit, so do let me know if it's out of line. There is not an official way to donate to the efforts to preserve the Olympia directly, as far as I know. It is possible to donate to the museum that houses her here. As a naval enthusiast, I have done so repeatedly and would love to keep an iconic part of the American maritime tradition afloat for all to see. Thanks AH!

After some delay, I finally buckled-in and finished my Nuclear History Bibliography, 2015. Glad it is (mostly) behind me. I think it makes a nice contribution to the field (if only other subfields did this!), and it's not too much labor for one person to pull off (this took the better part of today), but yeesh, my brain is just rubber after staring at citations and wrestling with Zotero for several straight hours.

Also, can I share something AMAZING? Apparently Derrida wrote an article about nuclear war in 1984. It is amazingly incomprehensible. And has dragons along the side of it. My favorite quote: "The name of nuclear war is the name of the first war which can be fought in the name of the name alone, that is, of everything and of nothing." Yeah, OK!

The Portuguese Colonial War

I thought most people here wouldn't know too much about the Portuguese Colonial War, and since this is a very interesting subject, that affected Portugal (and other countries) for a very long time, and still has repercussions today, I decided to make a small post in order to give out some information about it to the /r/askhistorians subreddit.

It's important to note the following, this is a very controversial subject, and will likely continue to be controversial for the next hundred years. There are a lot of people with very strong opinions, and a lot of propaganda and bias that obscure the situation as a whole. I am not immune to this, nor are any of the sources you are likely to find, i will however try to source as much information as i can, and expose the points and positions and goals of all sides, in order for you to have a view that is as objective as i possibly can give.

Another thing to note is that this entire area of history is very much unknown outside of those directly involved, and the vast majority of sources have no English translations. I will try to give as many English sources as i can, however, by virtue of the fact that many things have no English source, I will undoubtedly use and link sources in Portuguese.

Finally, i should mention that i am not a historian. I have always loved history, and my knowledge comes from spending a significant part of the past 10 years combing from reports, diaries, diplomatic telegrams, news stories, etc... If you are looking for a professional historian writing about this subject, this thread is not it, but if you look at the sources i cite you may find what you're looking for.

With all that being said, here we go.

The Portuguese Colonial War - A brief overview

The Portuguese Colonial war, also known as "Guerra do Ultramar" (War of the Overseas), was a number of conflicts in the now formerly Portuguese Overseas Territories (Territorios Ultramarinos Portugueses) that spanned a number of decades. The conflicts themselves are officially recognized as having started in 1961 and ended in 1974, however there are reasonable arguments to be made that they started earlier, and ended later. Perhaps as far back as 1954 with the effective annexation of Dadra and Nagar Haveli by the republic of India, and as recent as 2002 with the end of the civil war in Angola.

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All of these conflicts are interconnected, not only with themselves, but with Portuguese colonial policy spanning centuries, and therefore any study over them must by necessity include a study of both Portuguese colonial policy as defined back in the early 1400s, the political events in Portugal and the world in the early 1900s, and finally in the context of the cold war and the post WW2 world.

For that reason this first post will not go into the actual subject matter (the war itself) but will instead seek to explain to a foreign audience Portuguese Policy, ideology, doctrine regarding the overseas territories, as well as the events and motives that preceded the start of the war itself.

On Portuguese Colonial Policy as defined in the early 1400s

The Portuguese Colonial Empire was (and still is) the oldest in the world, it began, officially, on the 21st of August 1415 with the taking and conquest of the city of ceuta in north africa (Current day Ceuta, Spain). Such a conquest had as a goal, first to continue the reconquista into north africa, and secondly to secure trade routes in the region.

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The adventures in north africa were ultimately unsucessful, but the idea of securing small fortresses and cities in the region, in order to serve as centres of trade and resupply areas for ships and future expeditions stuck, and was carried on later in subsaharan africa with the building of dozens of feitorias, India and the far east with the taking of important cities like Goa, Malaca.

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Such feitorias were often manned by a small contingent of Portuguese men, and had the support of locals. It is here that an important diference between Portuguese and non-Portuguese colonial policy occurs. Unlike other colonial empires, portuguese colonial policy encouraged miscegenation as a way to not only maintain Portuguese power in the region, but to get and maintain local support for portuguese presence. This was not just limited to Portuguese men - native women arrangements, but also with the sending of young women to marry local rulers (as well as Portuguese stationed there).

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It is this key characteristic that led to the emergence and codification in the 1930s of the Lusotropicalismo theory, by Brasilian Anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, after a trip to portuguese africa.The luso–tropicalist representation emphasizes the uniqueness of the Portuguese colonial relations based on Portuguese empathy and capacity to deal with people from different cultures. This theory was partly adopted by the state in the 1940s, and used to justify Portuguese presence overseas, and even today most Portuguese will claim some parts of the theory to be true, in one way or another. Was it actually true? I don't know, and i'm not the person to make an authorative statement one way or another. What is true is that Portuguese colonial policy had significant diferences from British and French and German colonial policy, and from certain points of view it would appeal to certain sectors of the population.

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Now, whether or not Lusotropicalismo was true, doesn't really matter in the end, because regardless of it, Portugal had very deep ties to its overseas territories, for a very long time, and the people as a whole did view it as an issue of significant importance. As a matter of fact, colonies had been THE issue since 1415, and the state was very much at the mercy of what happened outside the metropolis. This is particularly apparent in the 1890 crisis, where a british ultimatum as a response to portuguese claims in africa (the pink map) caused serious damage to the prestige of the monarchy, and led to its eventual dissolution in 1910. Even today there are very deep feelings regarding that event, which is effectively seen as a betrayal by britain of the age old Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, and it was directly because of this event that the Portuguese national anthem was created.

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Got a decent chunk of work done on my dissertation this week! I'm pretty happy~ Here are my plans for next week:

https://gunlord500.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/gunlords-dissertation-saga-episode-10-in-the-zone/

If the king dies while the queen is pregnant with their first child, will her son be born as a prince or already as the new king?

I recently picked up a history minor to go along with my economics and marketing majors. Really excited to get more into it.

Got my first history column posted this week in one of our national newspapers! Awesome stuff, especially since I'm not working in anything history-related.

So I was playing Civ 5 before work. My small yet efficient empire was growing gloriously. At least, until that dickhead Attila suddenly declared war on me, and I see three Battering Rams over the horizon.

I've never felt so betrayed. Then my alarm went off and I had to go to work, so... dammit if the workweek can't end soon enough.

First time posting to this subreddit, though I've been following it for a time. One of the things I've wondered about time and time again is how common blue on blue, or friendly fire, occurred in warfare. I imagine that with the close proximity that they fought in, there were often very reactionary strikes dealt in the heat of battle. How often is this recounted in history? And what measures were taken to prevent it?

I'm giving some thought to starting an M. Litt in History soon (research Masters - a "mini-PhD"). I'm poking at something in the area of Irish culinary history, preferably medieval, but I know there's not much out there. Does anyone feel there's scope for a 60k word thesis on early Irish food, or would it have to be later to have enough material?

(I'm in Ireland, so have easy enough access to most archives, sources, etc.)