Some of the longtime readers here may know that I'm a native and lifelong resident of Los Angeles. But, as a historian of Britain, the other city that I know best is London; it's my archival home, and I've spent summers there and elsewhere in Britain doing research.

The funny thing about those two cities is that while they might seem about as different as any two Western cities could be, I notice little similarities all the time. One that struck me today is the sensory experience. Now, Los Angeles has a look, and sound, and smell that are all its own. In the summer, and on some hot and dry days year-round, there's a sort of hue to the light, and the smell of car exhaust mixed with dust, and a kind of shimming heat and haziness that is unlike anywhere else I've been. On cloudy and cool winter and spring days, though, it has a much different feel--and it can be a lot like London. This morning, there's a cool breeze, a little damp in the air, and a very grey hue to the light; there's also a ton of pollen, and the smell of flowers everywhere. When you mix that with car exhaust and the common smells of the city, it's giving me powerful flashbacks of walking from the Underground to the British Library. Now, the seasons don't match, not surprisingly; a cool spring day in Los Angeles is much more like a summer day in London. Still though, the sensory experience is striking.

I guess this is all a way of saying that I haven't been to Britain in a few years, and I miss it.

My blog post from last week, about doing some quantitative/visual analysis of a 1956 nuclear targeting list, got featured on a number of news sites and then finally made it to the top of two Reddit subs (/r/MapPorn and /r/dataisbeautiful). The result is that since it got posted (Monday, May 9th), that single post was viewed by some 250,000 people. Pretty bonkers.

Week two update: Success! Influences on foundation of the South American Republics garnered two absolutely fantastic responses from /u/drylaw and /u/Legendarytubahero, both of which I enjoyed greatly. Only 1.5 for 15 so far (got a book rec from /u/agentdcf as well), but glad to see I'm having some success. The experiment marches onwards, and next up is College life in Colonial America!

You may have heard that Fritz Stern, eminent historian of German history, died on Thursday. There is a brilliant obituary on the New York times. I've written a bit about his historical method on my blog.

I went to Verdun and the nearby areas. I thought I would share some of the pictures I took.

I'm home at last, without getting into the archives in Zim, but with over 10,000 images of documents from South Africa that I didn't have before. So even though one project is on hold, others can continue to move. Being back a couple of weeks before I'd planned has other benefits (besides assuring I'd have a family to come back to)--I'm able to plan for fall, and even relax, as I get ready to return to the normal workflow as an associate professor. Yep, the committee assignments have already been falling on me. Whoopee, what luck, etc etc.

Good morning everyone!

I recently acquired an interesting document: The Order of Battle of the Japanese Army, published in September 1942 by the U.S. Military Intelligence Service. I've uploaded pictures of the front cover, table of contents, foreword, and pages 1 and 11, here (I apologize for the atrocious quality).

From what I can gather, the Military Intelligence Service released multiple, updated editions of the text before the end of the war. I was wondering if anyone could offer additional insight or information.

There are numerous errors, unsurprisingly. For instance, on page 11, Nishimura Kikugoro is listed as the commanding general of the Imperial Guards Division; the actual commanders in 1942 were Nishimura Takuma (until April 1942) and Mutō Akira. In addition, Yamagata Tsuyuo was never associated with the Guards Division (as far as I know), and the 6th Guards Infantry Regiment should be the 5th.

If legal, I'd be happy to scan the entire book (it's not very long) once I get access to a proper scanner. :)

In an odd episode of family history, I discovered last week that my family is actually from a ghost town. I suppose I had always assumed that a ghost town would be rundown and ramshackle and, well, obvious and yet, I've been through there dozens of times without even realizing. Even though my father is compelled to point out how far the sidewalk used to go out to pretty much every time we went out that way, STILL I never connected that there was a larger settlement there once.

Edit: Oh, and to add, it was already a ghost town by the time my grandfather was born.

The Smithsonian had a nice summary of the work done so far on that tunnel found beneath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent at Teotihuacan.

Now that free time is officially my bitch, i've been spending entirely too much of it listening to the Grateful Dead and playing Fallout 4. I've also got a couple interesting projects on hold till Far Harbor blows over that i'm sure will get spread around AH whenever they get done.

I was reading through some Assyrian stelae and noticed that Tiglath-Pileser I made an explicit point of mentioning that he wasn't going to talk about his hunting achievements. Perhaps the first such stated omission in academic history.

Hello everyone, I was recommended to come here and ask for help by the folks over at /r/wwi. Basically I am trying to translate my great great Grandfather's WWI journal. He was a sergeant in the french military and he fought at Verdun. Feel free to either check out my post here or PM me for more info. Thanks everyone!

Compared to other methods, just how painful would be to be torn apart by horses?

Presumably, if you use lots of horses, wouldn't it be rather quick (the torn apart part), and then you die swiftly of blood loss?

The relatively small conference my supervisor organises was on yesterday and today, and I have inconveniently become deathly ill and unable to help out. I was around yesterday trying to be useful, but I deteriorated pretty badly over the course of the day, and today I wasn't even able to get out of bed until noon. Now I'm really dosed up on meds, and part of my brain is like 'you should work on those job applications you have to do!' while the more sensible part of me is like 'you can't even see straight half the time...maybe just leave it for later'.

On the upside, I did manage to network a bit with someone about a post doc position on the Cod Revolution that I'm applying for next week, and I even did so before I was too sick to function, so that was promising. Fingers crossed!

We at /r/EarlyModernEurope will be starting out Movie of the Month with Barry Lyndon. Information is posted there and I will be updating it later today. Everyone is welcome to participate and watch one of the best films of Stanley Kubrick.

I saw this post on Luwian Civilization on /r/AncientCivilizations the other day. I thought it was pretty interesting, though the presenter seemed a little biased in favor of his findings, which I guess is understandable. I'm curious if anyone on here has any expertise on the topic and/or thoughts on the video.

And on a completely unrelated note, I recently finished the Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie. It was a really fantastic series and I mention it here because, even though it's a sci-fi series, the society in the trilogy has some loose basis on the ancient Roman patronage system. That's my fun little history side-note for today.

Why do Redditors want the Primitive Technology guy to smelt bronze/iron so bad?

Hello everyone!

As a small subset of users may have noticed, I've been running an automated response for certain posts, specifically in two situations. First, when people post links to previous answer, Automod will ask them to include acknowledgement of the author. This ensures that the original poster gets proper credit, and also is aware that their old answer may be getting featured.

Secondly, when people do posts that are only username pings of flairs who might be interested in the question, Automod asks you to contact flairs via PM instead. While we LOVE pinging flairs about answers, and the mods do it all the time, the feeling is that doing it publicly puts them on the spot a bit if they don't show up, or if it is outside their wheelhouse. So we prefer that it be done through private message.

Anyways though, I'm interested in whether anyone has gotten the Automod messages, and in any feedback on how it is working.