Here's a comic on history books. Very mildly NSFW language in case that matters to you.

My review of Dan Zak's Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age just hit the stands in the latest issue of Science. The book is about the break-in to the Y-12 nuclear facility by a bunch of hippies a few years back, and is trying to grapple with big questions about the morality of nuclear weapons through that lens.

If you have a subscription you can read it here; if you don't and are interested, feel free to PM me and I'll send you a link.

I'm reading a book about late medieval merchantry which is focused on one individual. It's not a biography, per se, but it's about one man. It is astonishing how much this changes the tone and the feeling of usefulness of the book, and not, to my mind, in a positive way. The writer will just be getting going on a topic, going from the specific to something broader and more generally interesting when they have to stop, because it's no longer relevant to the one-man focus.

I mentioned this to someone else, and got an eyebrow and an oh-my-sweet-summer-child expression, as apparently this is a pretty normal thing outside my particular area of cultural history.

I find /r/askscience to be really lame and disappointing. One sentence answers with no background or explanation are routinely upvoted into the hundreds. There doesn't seem to be any uhhhh7i UT

Ok I was stung by a wasp while typing this. I'm leaving it.

Anyway I just think askscience is a missed opportunity because they need the kind of moderation and commitment to standards that this sub has.

Would this be the correct place to share my absolute adoration for Hark, A Vagrant! and/or Kate Beaton?

Her history-centered comics are hilarious and have sparked my interest in a number of figures and events that I wouldn't known of otherwise.

Well, I do have a question, but I don't think it needs its own thread (so I hope I'm not breaking the free-for-all):

I'm gonna be graduating with a BA in history. I'd really, really like to continue my education for a Master's...unfortunately, that demands a lot of money (and time) I'm not gonna have for a long while. One day I'd like to get that MA, but it won't be for years.

The Question: How do I keep up my historian skills in the mean time?

Mild question:

If we could send some laser foil back to, say 800 CE, would the aristocracy latch onto it as a unique 'jewelry' status material? What price would it command as an extremely rare luxury good? (Not like anyone will be able to make more for almost a millennia and a half.)

What's the best way to research graduate programs? If a University's Center of X or Y has a phone number on their website, is it kosher to call them up to look into details, or contact a professor directly?

What do you guys think about Martin A Lee? someone recomended his book Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond on audiobook, but it's right next to bill o'rileys book on their best seller's list which makes me feel dubious.

So I was attempting to gather up some sources on a topic, basically for fun as I am not a historian. I do, however, have an access to all the big journal databases through my university. JSTOR didn't really provide satsifaction on my end (and places like EBSCO and Scopus even less so) and I wonder if there's a super secret batch of articles only proper historians get to look through? Or maybe it was rather the issue of my topic being less researched and my expectancy for finding the articles too optimistic?

The topic I was looking at was broadly the immediate post-Napoleonic era and fates of the House of Bonaparte at that time. I was pointed to some books by few reviews and am in the process of getting them.

Just finished U.S. Grants personal memoirs (which can be found available online since it's in public domain) and while it obviously has some bias I still really enjoyed it. Even though I get that he was purposefully portraying himself as the common down to earth man I do feel that he did fit that even if he was more complex than that. That being said I have a bit of an odd book request. Does anybody know the best book about his post presidency world travelling?

Watching documetary on easy company in ww2 era. Is it possible to have nostalgia about an era you never were alive for? It seems like america and americans in general were so much more.. idk wholesome, respectful, proud. America seemed less eroded some how. I would like to think i would rather have lived then. It is almost like a longing.