AskReddit just asked "How are you a snob," so--dear AskHistorians community, how are you a history snob?

Did you go ballistic on a co-worker for mentioning Dan Carlin? Did you go ballistic on a co-worker for mentioning that they read Herodotus...in translation? Throw an otherwise-brilliant academic book across the room because its overview of scholarship started in 1980 instead of 1890? Criticize Pirates of the Caribbean for its historical accuracy? Have you actually endeavoured to make up a joke involving the Doge of Venice and Michel Foucault?

Brag about Tell me your secrets.

I'm making my way through The Shadow of the Unattained, the collected letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith - Sterling being a romantic poet from the early 20th century, today mostly unknown except as a friend and contemporary of the likes of Jack London and Ambrose Bierce; Smith being better known for his later correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and his fiction in Weird Tales during the 1930s. Sterling and Smith corresponded mostly in the 1910s, when Smith was a teenager, with Sterling providing criticism, encouragement, and support in getting Smith's first poetical works published. In one letter, Sterling wrote:

My friend Roosevelt Johnson has actually had a letter from Bierce, who was then in some small town in England. So the old war-horse is alive after all: I'm surprised that he let anyone know it.

• George Sterling to Clark Ashton Smith, 4 Jan 1915, The Shadow of the Unattained 132

Of course, Bierce had disappeared on his trip down to Mexico a couple years previously, so the idea of a letter arriving in 1915 would have been major...and set me on the brief task of querying various Bierce specialists and looking up Roosevelt Johnson - a childhood friend of Sterling's from Ann Arbor; it was actually Johnson who introduced Sterling to Bierce's work - you can read about it in "Roosevelt Johnson Becomes Reminiscent".

Of course, as is often the case, the answer was just a couple letters ahead:

That was a canard about Mr. Bierce. Johnson, when drunk, got hold of a postal Bierce had written him two years before!

• George Sterling to Clark Ashton Smith, 26 Feb 1916, SotU 133

The Bierce connection with the H. P. Lovecraft is kind of fun, because Lovecraft had it from a couple different angles - Clark Ashton Smith, who was friend and correspondent with Sterling who knew Bierce; Samuel Loveman, the poet and bookseller who corresponded with Bierce and published Twenty-One Letters of Ambrose Bierce (1922); and Adolphe Danzinger de Castro, who had collaborated with Bierce on the translation of "The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter," was a revision client of Lovecraft's, and Lovecraft had a hand in editing de Castro's Portrait of Ambrose Bierce (1929), although the work was finished by Lovecraft's friend Frank Belknap Long. Indirectly, of course, Bierce's fiction contributed to Lovecraft's mythos via borrowings from Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow (1895).

I've been busy over the past week making a map in Google Map/Earth showing the economic output (by koku) of each pre-Modern Japanese province.

So far I've done Owari, Mikawa, Tōtomi, Suruga, Izu, and Mino. It's pretty eye opening, even for me. I think I'll post the sample tomorrow.

Apparently, some scholars are now claiming that "ancient Greeks artists could have travelled to China 1,500 years ... and helped design the famous Terracotta Army," citing the discovery of "European DNA" in Xinjiang. This strikes me as a bunch of Hellenocentric nonsense, even with my very basic knowledge of the historical demographics of Xinjiang and pre-Qin Chinese art. Any expert opinions?

It's been a while, brothers and sisters of /r/AskHistorians, but I'm finally back! I just had my first chapter conference about my dissertation it went REALLY well (even if my trip to New Haven as a whole wasn't so nice cause I got a tummy bug ;_; ). Check it out here for a in-depth description of the suggestions I received:

https://gunlord500.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/gunlords-dissertation-saga-episode-17-season-2/

Anyone wondering about the nuts and bolts of dissertation writing might find this good reading :D

For the past few weeks I have been on a history binge-voyage in the UK and now Ireland. I saw London, Cardiff and especially Castle Cardiff, the Roman fort/Norman stronghold/Tudor Castle/etc that was spectacularly restored by the Marquesses of Bute and Pembroke where Henry VII was born, and now Ireland, the ancient East and especially the West (Ring of Kerry, Galway, Dublin, Cork, Skellig Michael, Powers court, and as much of everything else I can manage.)

My great grandfather William was from Cork so it's nice to see the city and Ireland has always fascinated me anyway :-)

I do however, have a question and that is what literature would you recommend for someone who wanted know about Celtic religion and culture?

Is there a method of showing the comment count as just the non deleted comments.

E.g. the Romani gypsy thread has 44 comments as of now, and all but two are deleted.

This is especially relevant to subreddits like this where a lot of moderation takes place.

Finally finished A World at Arms - A Global History of World War II by Gerhard L. Weinberg. I think it's a little above my level, but hot damn that's a goodun. Couple things I hadn't heard before that he hit me with right in a row:

• The Germans had kamikazes. They only flew one mission on April 7, 1945. He doesn't specify what, if anything, happened on the mission but the plan was to take single-seater fighters and ram the bombers.

As a footnote to that, he adds:

• Roosevelt favored a project to "load up war weary planes with explosives, fly them toward Germany with skeleton crews which would bail out over Allied territory at the last moment, and leave the planes to crash with a big explosion somewhere in the Third Reich."

I thought both of those nuggets were particularly interesting.

-----Bonus Question I'm going to do a reread - any recommendations for websites for maps like this? Maps are a little sparse in the book and I always like having a visual.

Are there any books detailing sex across human history? Just an all-around book going into sex across cultures.

I've read about WW2 and the surrounding time period almost exclusively and want to branch out a bit, but I'm not sure where to look. Anyone with a similar interest have some suggestions? I know "Rome" is popular, but it seems expansive and not particularly related.