A sort-of historical question: Aside from senior church officials, and the presidential candidates, if it's an election year, who traditionally attends the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner? In the pictures I saw someone wearing an OBE (I couldn't tell the class) so that made me wonder.

Ah, turn of the 14th century Germany, where whether we should call women "ladies" or "wenches" is debated by male poets named Praise-Women and Rainbow.

Wikipedia quibble wars are always fun rips out hair

The Wikipedia article on the P-38 Lightning (after the latest reversion of my edits) cites a production figure of 10,037 aircraft, this coming from David Donald's The Encyclopedia of World Aircraft and Fighters of the US Air Force: From World War I Pursuits to the F-117. None of the categories in the broken-down-by-model production chart have individual citations. The Wikipedia article in its reverted form contains several errors:

It lists the number of "P-38" (the first model) produced as 30; one was completed as an XP-38A so this should be 29

• It lists the number of RP-322 produced as 147; it should be 143

• It lists the number of "F-4" (they should be "F-4-1") produced as "100+"; it should be 99

• It lists the number of F-5A produced as 180; it should be 181

• It lists the number of F-5E converted as 705; it should be 405

• It lists the number of P-38M converted as 75; it should be 80

We have the chart below of newly-produced airframes, calculated using serial numbers taken from Lockheed factory documents and the National Archives, courtesy of Joseph F. Baugher, who also uses the following sources when discussing the P-38:

• Lockheed Aircraft Since 1913, Rene J. Francillon, Naval Institute Press, 1987

• The P-38J-M Lockheed Lightning, Profile Publications, Le Roy Weber Profile Publications, Ltd, 1965.

• War Planes of the Second World War, Fighters, Volume Four, William Green, Doubleday, 1964.

• Famous Fighters of the Second World War, William Green, Doubleday, 1967.

• The American Fighter, Enzo Anguluci and Peter Bowers, Orion Books, 1987.

• Wings of the Weird and Wonderful, Captain Eric Brown, Airlife, 1985.

• United States Military Aircraft since 1909, Gordon Swanborough and Peter M. Bowers, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Martin Caidin's Fork-Tailed Devil (1973) is sadly left out for some reason

Here is a table of existing P-38 airframes that were later converted to other models. These do not add to the 10,037 figure given above

I'm slowly wading my way back into the intellectual horrors of the argumentum ad Hitlerum. A small post about Hitler's electoral "pivot" in the 1920's-30's: Godwin's Lawyer

The New-York Historical Society has a pair of miniature portraits of Silas Wright (14th governor of this great state) and Clarissa Moody Wright in its collection. This is actually terribly wrong because the NYHS was started by DeWitt Clinton, and Silas Wright bitterly opposed DeWitt Clinton and everything he stood for. Take to the streets!

I finally finished Peter Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy! At 850 pages, excluding references/index/stuff, it's one of the longest works of history I've read. I'm going to try to motivate myself to write up a little review of it for tomorrow, but the tl;dr is that I really enjoyed it, but it opens stronger than it finishes.

Now it's on to some lighter reading before I try tackling the next massive tome in the pile.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: is it still worth reading? Brown developed the idea of Late Antiquity in the 1970s and shaped our current understanding of the field, so considering that The Decline and Fall influenced historiography up till Brown, how does the historiography concerning Rome written between 1900-1970 hold up? Is that also still relevant?

I know that medieval knights commonly carry swords on them, even on horseback, in the occasion of close quarters combat; however, I have never seen or heard of a sheath to carry a lance, as it would probably be rediculusly large. After a knight charges into an enemy formation or spears a guy, would he leave the lance on the ground? Are lances and other weapons a common sight on the battlefield floor? Wouldn't a dropped lance then mean the Knights couldn't use it for the rest of the battle?

Lately I've been delving into the genealogy world in tracing some Northern California native women and documenting how their lives changed shortly after and during the Gold Rush ca. 1849. This s completely new territory for me. I've never done any genealogy work before. The problem that keeps coming up is that names, even surnames very often change within a lifetime. For example, Adelpha Sire becomes Delphy Seir, Delpha Sear, Delphia Sear, then Delphia Sears Flowers. The dates of birth are consistent. The parentage and family never changes and there are multiple lines of evidence confirming this is the same person. My question is, when writing this up, do I need to provide all the confirmatory evidence or simply footnote that the names change by census or tribal count but there is sufficient evidence to show this the same person?

If I know an answer, and can add follow-up info, but can't access the sources used to find such info, would I better off not linking to a source, or in such instances can I refer to Wiki?

It's rarely gonna come up, there's not much on here I can answer well enough.