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.
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.
Grau, Lester W. "Breaking Contact Without Leaving Chaos: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan." The Journal of Military Slavic Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 235-261.
There is a literature and a common perception that the Soviets were defeated and driven from Afghanistan. This is not true. When the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, they did so in a coordinated, deliberate, professional manner, leaving behind a functioning government, an improved military and an advisory and economic effort insuring the continued viability of the government. The withdrawal was based on a coordinated diplomatic, economic and military plan permitting Soviet forces to withdraw in good order and the Afghan government to survive. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) managed to hold on despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Only then, with the loss of Soviet support and the increased efforts by the Mujahideen (holy warriors) and Pakistan, did the DRA slide toward defeat in April 1992. The Soviet effort to withdraw in good order was well executed and can serve as a model for other disengagements from similar nations. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979–1989, its occupation force, the 40th Army conducted 220 independent operations and over 400 combined operations of various scales. Many of these large-scale operations accomplished little, since this was primarily a tactical commanders' war. Some large-scale operations, such as the initial incursion into Afghanistan, Operation Magistral, which opened the highway to Khowst and the final withdrawal, were effective because the force employed was appropriate to the mission.
note: if the link doesn't work for you, tell me and I'll find more open souces.
I am going to resubmit my last submission from last time because I've read this article and I really like it. And I've been dying to discuss this with others as it relates to other methods of alcohol production.
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.
"Nietzsche Is Dead", by Meredith Hindley. Published in "Humanities" July/August 2012.
An article on the fight to control and shape Nietzsche's legacy in the years immediately following his death:
Count Harry Kessler received the news in the officers’ mess of his army regiment from a fellow officer going through dispatches. On October 25, 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche, who had famously announced the death of God, had himself died. [...]
In the years leading up to the First World War, Kessler channeled his organizational talents into designing and raising money for a memorial to honor Nietzsche. But he wasn’t the only one with a keen interest in the philosopher’s legacy. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, had her own ideas about how her brother’s work and life should be used.
"Machines, Power and the Ancient Economy" by Andrew Wilson
