I freelanced a story for The Guardian this week, which was nice.

Expectabo vos die lunae, nonis Martiis, ut de lingua Latina et Roma antiqua loquamur!

Me at the The University of Reading's Roman classroom

See you on Monday 7/3, from 3pm GMT / 10am EST

Maybe this merits its own thread, but I just posted a different question a few seconds ago and I'm impatient.

I've been reading David Bell's "The First Total War" for the past week. Is there any validity to his claim (or maybe my interpretation of what he's saying) that the works of the philosophes of the Enlightenment Era were one of the most influential factors in how the public perceived warfare? The book covers the shift from the idea that war served the purposes of defending honor and glory to the idea that monarchs were using the poor as meat puppets for personal gain or to defend their personal honor. This all leads up (not saying it's causal) to the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars.

But there seems to be a resurgence in the idea of war as a noble cause just prior to World War I. And then the death toll of that war (which is hard to grasp even today) stomps this idea out again. Are these shifts common throughout history? Or is the pattern I'm noticing completely incorrect?

I just got the last of my books from when I was at the AHA in Atlanta and they are wonderful. First up that I'm super excited about is "Marriage and the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century". They didn't have it on their display table, so I bought it sight-unseen, but boy will it be worth it. Chapter 3: Military Masculinities. Yes!

Also, I need to know if I'm really the only one who found this funny.

Awhile ago, I was taking a Balkan History course, and the professor was lecturing on the First Comintern. When she said that they tried to find a doctrine that encompassed all of them, I raised my hand and asked "So you mean this was like a Commstitutional Convention?"

Only my buddy laughed. The professor chuckled so I wouldn't feel bad. I still felt bad.

My classes for fall semester are already lining up and they look SWEEEEEET: upper division classes in early modern Europe, the British empire, and the cultural history of environment in the West. This'll hopefully come with my standard world and Western Civ surveys at another campus, so I'll have a full load of classes, some of which are fun and awesome and others that are pretty easy.

Adjunct life can be rough, but I can't deny that I love the work.

Today I was supposed to be exploring the archives for my thesis. Instead, last night I hurt my back and can't even get out of bed today without excruciating, sweat inducing pain.

This is not the birthday gift I was hoping for this week.

As a part of gearing my brain back up toward an M.Litt, I'm trying to put together a reading list for myself on the topic of Culinary History. I was hoping to find something online in this direction, but so far, the output of Columbia University Press (specifically the Arts & Traditions of the Table series, and a book called Food: A Culinary History) seems to be as good as it gets. Pending my going through the bibliographies of the latter, has anyone any suggestions for essential reading?

Can anyone tell me anything about the history programs at Fordham? I've just separated from the military and am looking at a history major using my GI Bill. Unfortunately/fortunately, I'm working full time as well so it'll be nights and weekends and online classes for me.

I'm working and living in NJ so I'm open to any recommendations to other schools as well.

This probably belongs in a Thursday Theory thread, but of course that was yesterday, and I'm too impatient to wait for next week.

I've been thinking a lot about frontiers/borderlands/boundaries and how best to think and talk about them. I'm writing my prospectus right now for my dissertation on medieval Ireland. The word frontier is a tricky one for medieval Irish scholarship, and it carries a lot of baggage. Lots of people use it, often in completely contradictory ways to the people they're responding to. So I'm a little leery of using it myself and wading into the middle of a gigantic historiographical mess. At the same time, though, I've struggled to come up with a better way to describe a society where two cultures meet and mingle, but also maintain certain boundaries. A lot of these boundaries are legal and -- at least ostensibly -- preserve the superior status of the Anglo-Irish over the native Irish. When it comes down to daily interactions, on the other hand, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the boundaries (both cultural and physical) were pretty fluid.

Borderlands is the word my adviser prefers, and while it does get around some of the baggage of the frontier, I have a few problems with it -- most importantly that it implies the existence of an actual border, which in my part of the country didn't really exist.

I've found that talking with my Americanist friends is very helpful here, because there's been a lot more turnover in the scholarship of frontiers in American history. Scholarship on medieval Irish frontiers is basically still mired in the Turner thesis. So with that in mind, I thought that maybe reaching out to historians in other fields might spark some new way to think about this. Does anyone have any thoughts on this vocabulary?

I just started reading Ian Kershaw's To Hell and Back. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I've been stoked to get to it, because one of my former professors had nothing but high praise for Kershaw's work.

I just finished my MA in History in December. I read some fiction to celebrate, but I can't override this feeling that I just need to keep reading me some history.

Well, the bad news is that I didn't finish the rough draft of my dissertation last week, but the good news is that I don't think it matters that much:

https://gunlord500.wordpress.com/2016/03/04/gunlords-dissertation-saga-episode-13the-countdown-continues/

My profs never got back to my email, so I'm not sure if they wanted it before the end of February or gave me an extension for this Wednesday...however, thinking about it, this time of year (early Spring) is super busy for them, so they wouldn't be able to look at it anyways. So I figured I might as well take an extra week to work on it. My committee is pretty lenient generally, so I don't think they'd mind if I was "late" if they were too busy to look at my work in early March, anyways. At least I hope...:scared:

There was also a terrifying moment when my computer crashed while I was working on my third chapter! Thankfully, it fixed itself quickly after running a self repair thing, but hoo boy, that was a close call...I promptly backed everything up on a flash drive the moment it came back on line! The prospect of losing over a month of work is not pleasant x_x

I posted this last week but got no responses so I figured i'd try one more time:

For a project of mine I am looking for information on a Madrid cathedral, the Church of San Luis. Literally anything that mentions it would be helpful to me. My research on it concerns the time during the Spanish Civil War, its destruction via mob riot and a hanging that occurred at its location during the Spanish Civil War.

I blame /u/dubstripsquads for getting me into the deeeeeeeeeep hole that is the history of American Civil Rights.

It's absolutely depressing.

I've been trying to find a book by or about a war correspondent in the 80s and 90s. I thought it was War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges; however, I re-read the thing and couldn't find what I was looking for. (Or maybe the impact of the passage is simply diluted for me.)

I remember there was a passage about the psychological impact of being a war correspondent, how war correspondents become addicted to combat (while also, of course, dealing with PTSD etc.). It was quite an emotional description of how correspondents can get themselves killed because they can't give up the thrill of being in these situations.

I've tried a couple of other books I read around the same time, but no joy. Any suggestions? Other sources that deal with the same subject?

> mfw I accidentally mixed up the dates and now my return flight was booked for next month instead of next Monday.

You have one job, brain.

I recently read a thread, that I believe was quite new, about civilan support for the anti-semitic policy in nazi-germany. It contained a great answer, referring to several academic debates, and one debate was concerning the civilian suport for the policies of the nationalsocialistic government. I can't find the thread if so to save my life. Does anyone know of this thread I'm talking about?

I'm getting closer and closer to the final draft of my thesis. After this I never want to go back to English history again.

Anyone know of some good reading material on the diet of the classes in medieval or early renaissance Britain and/or France?

Thank you.

So no doubt you are aware that it's become quite fashionable recently to compare modern-day America to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire/Republic. Regardless of the accuracy of this comparison, was there any event in Roman political history that is at all comparable to the literal dick-measuring contest we saw in the most recent Republican debate? This question has really been bugging me, for some reason.

Query: Tell a story of a time that you have validated the stereotype of the absentminded professor (recognizing that many here are not professors but are of a similar bent).