I was browsing through AskHistorians's deep archives and came across this, perhaps my favorite comment of all time, and that I had all but forgotten about.

(With a nod to /u/Tiako)

Lots of Jackson stuff

I suppose this is a minor or trivia-seeking question, but it's been bugging me for a while.

It's about The Walking Dead. Not about the zombies part, but the society part (which is, if you're not watching the show, what it's really about - zombies are just like weather; social organizations are where all the conflicts arise).

Is the society in The Walking Dead at all precedented? I mean, is it anything like, I dunno, 1980s Somalia or Iron Age England or Mongolia before Genghis Khan?

What you've got is clusters of people who are good at surviving and who either 1. try to regain a domestic life by somehow fortifying a town (or farm or prison), or 2. go around raiding other groups of survivors.

Moral codes seem to be constantly in flux or negotiation (individually and in groups), and there's something kind of Hobbesian in the fictional world about the success of cruelty as a social strategy - not just for keeping out-groups "in line", but also for somehow inspiring loyalty among followers (or at least a kind of sociopathic, "Not me, don't care" attitude, which seems like a really shaky basis for maintaining a cohesive group identity).

In other words, are Negan and the Governor (and the folks at Terminus) on the ball as far as examples like, I dunno, Genghis Khan or Timur or Caligula go? (Or, for that matter, Kony or the Florida Outlaws?) I know people can be horrific. I'm just not sure horrific can be ... politically stable.

Maybe I just need reassurance.

Was there ever any concerted effort in the West to discount or downplay the soviet role in defeating Nazi Germany? Or did it naturally get forgotten because the Soviets became the new bad guys and therefore unmarketable?

Edit: Forgotten by the people, ask someone here on the street who defeated the Nazis and they'll say it was the Americans. They know of Rommel but not Zhukov.

I have noticed that there seem to be a fewer "who built the pyramids" type questions this time of year than last year. Possibly related to U.S. political developments?

As I've done in /r/badhistory, I would like to shill for the manga Ad Astra - Scipio to Hannibal. Although regrettably, this is not an adaptation where all the main players are cute girls.

(you'd want Oda Nobuna no Yabou for that)

I've been interested in alt history lately. But a lot of it seems pretty ridiculous. So whats you're favorite piece of alt history?

I have recently discovered what I think may very well be one of the earliest incarnations of the modern Irish slavery myth we often see brought up here, in the form of an open letter to William Wilberforce asking why he is so obsessed with the problem of African slavery when there were Irish slaves, and Irish people had it so much worse than black slaves in the British Caribbean could possibly imagine. The letter dates from 1792, around the time when Wilberforce was championing a bill for abolition of the slave trade in the House of Commons, and is ostensibly written by an impoverished Irishman. Here is an excerpt, transcribed by yours truly into language a little easier on modern eyes:

Now my good nature [gentleman], you must know that there is a near relation, a [cousin] of my wife's here who was formerly [living] in America, at the [expense] of the Government for his natural life, and who used to work in the same Tobacco Plantation with the Black Slaves: and he [assures] me, that there is no [comparison] between the manner they live there and in the West Indies, (where he has also [been]) and the way we starve in poor Old Ireland. The Black Slaves he says, [eat] and drink, and dance, and [wear clothes], and are merry, and would think it the greatest of all curses to be sent back again to their own country, while we poor black and blue WHITE SLAVES can get neither mate, nor drink, nor [clothes], nor anything else, (except children to make us more and more miserable) [...] let your charity begin as near home as possible

Emphasis is from the original text. It does, of course, seem a little ridiculous that a deeply impoverished Irishman (who reports to be severely malnourished, with 14 children to feed and an ill wife and mother) is going to spend time writing letters to William Wilberforce, coincidentally at a time when Wilberforce is driving a parliamentary campaign for abolition, and writing many decades after Irish indenture had been largely phased out as a prominent phenomenon in the British Caribbean. Much more likely is that this is a letter written purposefully to paint Wilberforce as someone who neglects affairs at home in pursuing abolition, suggesting that the plight of the Irish at home - who he calls slaves - is much worse, with slaves in the New World living joyful and easy lives by any standard. It explicitly refers to them as 'white slaves', and implicitly suggests that Irish workers in the New World were, too, by virtue of being indentured servants working on tobacco estates.

Not only is it utterly fascinating in its own right, but it also highlights the fact that the Irish slavery myth is one of the oldest means by way the experiences of African slaves and their descendants have been denied, marginalised and de-legitimised, and the history of slavery whitewashed to catch it as either a benign institution or to deny its inherently racial character (in this case, both). So when you next see one of those godawful Irish slavery memes on the internet, be mindful that you are seeing a story that very much begin as a pro-slavery narrative at least 224 years ago.

Short little blog post today: what the shapes of atomic bombs do and don't tell us: Silhouettes of the bomb. Bonus: it turns out that "silhouette" is a word my brain cannot ever spell correctly on the first try.

This is shameless self-advertising; I hope that's allowed. /r/PhilosophyBookClub is starting our summer read: Anthony Kenny’s fantastic ‘New History of Western Philosophy’, summed up by the Times Higher Education as:

Not only an authoritative guide to the history of philosophy, but also a compelling introduction to every major area of philosophical enquiry"

I thought some of you might be interested in joining us, especially since Kenny takes a historical approach, explaining both the philosophical ideas and their historical context in detail, from ~600BC to 1950AD. While we wait to get started on that, we’re also reading Plato’s Euthyphro and Meno.

Here’s our post on Kenny’s book, and here’s our post on the Euthypro and the Meno.

We’re reading the first section for Euthyphro for May 2, and the full summer schedule is up at /r/PhilosophyBookClub. I hope some of you will join us, and if you have any questions, let me know.

-Cheers

If you don't like Andrew Jackson, perhaps one way to express disdain for him would be associate him with something that he disapproved of, for example, by putting him on a note issued by a central bank.

Ok, so I don't know if this belongs here or not, but I'm supposed to be writing a paper for my WWII class using this prompt and I'm struggling to understand it. Does anyone have any ideas? "When trying to come to grips with the Second World War in Europe, is it more useful to ask if the allies won, or if Germany lost?" I know quite a lot about the topic, but I don't understand this question.

18 days of photography, 7500 images. I'm behind on indexing!

Indeed, my replaced camera shutter (see last week--yes, it was done on Saturday after breaking Friday!) is holding up. The importance of good equipment can't be overstated, but some of that equipment likes to break.

Other than that, I'm still waiting to hear about clearance for Zimbabwe. My colleagues are pestering them (and their superiors) constantly, but are being told "not yet, not yet" and now they've raised roadblocks in the form of questioning my choice of a host. The result is that my time is dwindling; I've got less than five weeks now, and if I don't go in the next two weeks or so, the trip may not be worth it. The injury added is that not going would require me to pay back a significant grant I have to do the work. Yes, I set the money aside so I can do that if I must, but it means that agency will be wary of funding African research ever again, and if I'm denied access I may never get into Zimbabwe. This upsets me.

Until then, I'm in the ex-Transvaal, trying to work on an alternate set of projects. It's keeping me busy, which is good.