This topic is to ask for submissions for journal articles or book chapters from our community. Anyone can submit, you do not need to have a flair. Please limit one submission per person. And please refrain from submitting entire books as our time frame does not allow it.
Suggestions for this week
Some users have made some suggestions regarding changes in format as we continue to develop the book club.
Some have called for a simpler format when it comes to the title of the submission. The suggestion was just to have the title of the work and the author and leave out the journal or edited volume, year, page numbers, etc. Feedback on this would be appreciated and if anyone wants to try this out on their submission, please do.
The first paper was a rather niche subject, which I was fine with. But some people have expressed the desire for more general and accessible papers for now until we can build ourselves up to these more niche subjects. Perhaps for this round try and keep this in mind as you find something to submit.
Topic
Any submission must be related to history. We have a wide variety of flaired users from fields such as archaeology to linguistics to medicine to music. Let's use it to our advantage. As long as the submission pertains to understanding the past, it is open for the book club. We are trying to broaden our horizons and understanding of the past and that must include seeing the past through a different lens. So do not frett if your submission comes from a medical journal, a music theory journal, or an edited volume by Mesoamerican archaeologists, it's all welcome. If it isn't, someone will kindly let you know. So if you want to submit something on Stonehenge, or changes in letter choice for recording indigenous languages during the colonial period, or advancements in medicine in the late 1700s, or experimental recreation of ancient music, go for it.
Article information
Included in your submission must be the author or authors, the title of the work, the journal/book, year, etc. If using Google Scholar, there is an easy and handy Cite tool which gives a variety of options for citations. You can easily copy/paste that for your submission. My preference is MLA, but it will not be strictly enforced.
Accessible
Any journal article or book chapter must be accessible to the community, preferably through a link. The easiest way that I’ve found to do this is to use Google Scholar. As I’ve shown in this example, when searching for articles there is sometimes a link off to the right in which you can access the article or chapter for free. This is the link you must include in your submission, not a link to the journal page. I will be monitoring submissions to let anyone know if their links fail, but since I am based in the US my access could be biased. If anyone finds a broken link, please let me or the submitter know so that it can be fixed.
Abstract/Summary
Along with the link please include the abstract from the journal article or a written summary for the article/book chapter. This is to give us all an idea of what the article/chapter is about so that we can make a semi-informed vote.
Voting
Voting will run from now until Wednesday morning around 7am EST. Whichever submission has the most votes by that time will be chosen for us to read over the course of the following week.
Using the article from my Scholar example for our format example, the format should be as follows
- Headrick, Annabeth. "The Street of the Dead… It Really Was." Ancient Mesoamerica 10.01 (1999): 69-85.
- The name “Street of the Dead” used to designate Teotihuacan’s main avenue originates from a Nahuatl notation on a sixteenth-century map. Though this “story” is often deemed apocryphal, I argue in this paper that oral tradition preserved conceptual information that may not be archaeologically recoverable. Support for this position comes from comparative cultural analysis of Mesoamerican mortuary bundles as they are expressed in ritual and iconography. Crucial to this argument are the well-known stone masks of Teotihuacan. A case is made that the masks originally served as the faces of oracular mortuary bundles. The likely existence of mortuary bundles at Teotihuacan generates organizational models for the city in which lineage emerges as a fundamental element and suggests new insight into status differentiation and the iconography of power at Teotihuacan.
"Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact"
Zizumbo-Villarreal, Daniel, et al. "Distillation in western Mesoamerica before European contact." Economic botany 63.4 (2009): 413-426.
Distillation in Western Mesoamerica before European Contact. Fermented beverages are almost universal among ancient human societies. Ethanol is an analgesic, disinfectant, and mind-altering substance, and can help to preserve and enhance the nutritional value of food. Fermentation has therefore played a key role in human cultural and technological development. In Mesoamerica, codices and colonial-era sources describe a variety of fermented beverages produced before European contact. Distilled beverages, in contrast, have not been invented in all cultures, and their production in pre-contact Mesoamerica remains controversial. We tested the hypothesis of Needham et al. (1980) that Capacha gourd and trifid vessels described by Kelly (1974) for the Early Formative (1500–1000 BCE) in Colima state, western Mexico, could have been used to produce distilled beverages. Experiments using vessel replicas, techniques, and materials (including agave ferment) available in this region during this period successfully produced ethanol-containing distillates. We propose the possible origin and development of a “Capacha-type Mesoamerican still” from bean pots or from steamer pots used during this period, and discuss the possible production of spirits as part of the prevailing agricultural and cultural system. Average gourd and trifid vessel sizes, their archaeological context, and the ethanol yields of the replicas suggest that, if used as stills, they were used to produce a prestige product for ceremonial purposes, with high social and cultural relevance.
- Wood, Gordon S. "Rhetoric and reality in the American revolution." The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History (1966): 4-32.
- First Paragraph: "If any catch phrase is to characterize the work being done on the American Revolution by this generation of historians, it will probably be 'the American Revolution considered as an intellectual movement.' For we now seem to be fully involved in a phase of writing about the Revolution in which the thought of the Revolutionaries, rather than their social and economic interests, has become the major focus of research and analysis. This recent emphasis on ideas is not of course new, and indeed right from the beginning it has characterized almost all our attempts to understand the Revolution. The ideas of a period which Samuel Eliot Morison and Harold Laski once described as, next to the English revolutionary decades of the seventeenth century, the most fruitful era in the history of Western political thought could never be completely ignored in any phase of our history writing.
Figured I'd throw this up for the 4th of July. Let me know if it's too long. Based on me being able to understand it, hopefully it suits the criteria for more general papers.
