Hi, I'm Dr Jim Leary, lecturer in Archaeology and Director of the Archaeology Field School at the University of Reading in England.

I'm going to be here in AskHistorians to give an AMA on the 10th of November at 5pm GMT. I'll be talking about my work on round mounds, which included recently discovering an Iron Age mound previously thought to be Norman, leading an archaeological field school for my students and members of the public every year, digging Neolithic henge monuments, and my book on sea level rise after the last Ice Age, and more.

I hope you can join me then.

Dr Jim Leary @Jim_Leary

This semester I got slammed with a MWF schedule when I usually teach MW. I've been adapting my survey course to that ever since. The problem is that, compared to a MW schedule, we lose ten minutes off the top (3 x 50 mins. vs 2 x 80) and then we lose another ten in spool-up and wind-down as our ridiculously short passing period (ten minutes at most, across a sprawling campus) makes students have to be ready to bolt. The result is that I'm a full class behind, and unsure how to make it up. It's maddening, because they did this to me while I was overseas and unable to check on it. Friday used to be a writing day, and now I just collapse in a heap and start preparing for the next week.

These are the complaints of the tenured and comfortable, however, so I realize it's self-indulgent to mention it. But I'm not sure how to reconfigure well without totally cutting important material or re-engineering a course that will go back to twice a week as soon as this year is over. Any silver bullets out there?

Otherwise, we've had some great visitors in environmental studies this week--old friends, most of them, who have made very good out there in the East/Central African fields. It's been great to catch up with them, but talking about their work really makes me want to get back to my own (as soon as the Friday Curse is gone). All the theory and debates come back to me as we all sit around a table again, and I realize just how isolated I am from the constant intellectual challenge I had on the East Coast. Again, it's just a self-indulgent complaints from someone with a level of security in academia that is rare these days, but I really have come to prize the moments when I can return to that feeling of being in the center of it all. Sigh. I guess the lesson to graduate students is that you may find yourself in a wonderful place that nevertheless makes you miss the precarious but dynamic world of being a grad in some densely-populated collegiate world.

OK, old man rant over.

I am reading The Half Has Never Been Told and it is...powerful. I find its unapologetic description of the horrors of slavery to be needed (I live and grew up in Texas). I also think some of the challenges he makes to the histories of slavery apply well to the field I study. Particularly,

"The focus on showing African Americans as assertive rebels, for instance, implied an uncomfortable corollary. If one should be impressed by those who rebelled, because they resisted, one should not be proud of those who did not. And there were very few rebellions in the history of slavery in the United States. Some scholars tried to backfill against this quandary by arguing that all African Americans together created a culture of resistance, especially in slave quarters and other spaces outside of white observation. (XVIII)"

This reminds me of the focus on survivors in American Holocaust cinema and the question of the nature of resistance.

Thoughts?

I want to get a flair, but I am unsure if I meet the standards for quality answers that are required for flairing; below are some examples of posts I've made:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vrqyp/where_did_the_republic_of_venice_get_the_manpower/d618j16/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34b6nl/how_is_it_that_the_grecobactrian_kingdom_was_one/cqteuss/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/585hhz/why_did_the_normans_disappear_as_a_people/d8xq2i1/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4esg07/until_fairly_recently_campaigning_armies_often/d23a9sy/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/58hk1t/how_did_genoa_get_land_in_crimea/d90v8px/

This is probably my most comprehensive post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4fn3r9/italian_history_how_did_the_republic_of_venice/d2cd2pn/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32zduy/why_did_the_romans_stop_expanding/cqg6jjk/

I have been playing Civilization VI so that I can give it a short essay review for a history of science and technology journal. I have quite a lot of thoughts on it, but my main verdict: it is, somehow, much more boring than any version of Civ I have played so far. I cannot put my finger on why. But it just seems to require a ridiculous amount of time and nit-picking to get anything done. And the character animations, etc., every time I am denounced (for being a war-monger, but jeez, do you guys know how the game is won?) get very tedious as well. And the fact that workers are fixed-use and need to be 100% manually deployed... ugh. And barbarians are just annoying as hell, because they respawn in any fog of war spaces, and muck up your civilian units who are just trying to get things done.

Anyway this review is proving to be a lot less fun than I thought it would be.

I've recently started reading Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940 by Catherine Murdock after finishing Okrent's Last Call and Pegram's Battling Demon Rum. Okrent's narrative history was a great, fluid introduction to the Prohibition era and background while Pegram's covered more of the governmental changes and wider rises and falls of Prohibition and Temperance sentiment.

Dr. Murdock's sole focus on the role of women in the social agitation behind the latter Temperance movement (as the earlier ground to a halt in the face of the Civil War for reasons i'll explain if anyone cares enough) has been fantastic so far. She discusses the creation of saloons as a gendered space and how women forced themselves into the drinking world as a means to generate social equality as well as how the Prohibition and Suffrage Movements built up hand in hand, on the backs of women.

Currently doing a history paper for CGSC (Command and General Staff College), the topic I chose was "Why was the British military technologically behind at the beginning of WW2". They probably want me to focus on things like the continued lack of funding by simply extending the 'ten years of peace' rule. My position is that the premise is incorrect, the Brits were as good as anyone else.

Which is fine as far as it goes, they like my challenging them. The problem is coming up with all the citations necessary. "I saw it in this book I read a couple of years ago" isn't really going to cut it, and I've spent more time digging through my bookshelves for a single line I remember in a particular 500-page book (I've a great memory for such things) than I have actually writing the paper.

I haven't yet figured out how to deal with the "From a document in the Archives. No, I didn't write down the box number, but I can provide you the scanned copy from my hard drive if you really want to see it" problem.

I spent the whole day reading the 5th Dalai Lama's History of Tibet, while practicing my Classical Tibetan and charting out the entire lineage of Tibetan Kings from the Mythical to the Semi-Mythical. And then I got to Songtsen Gampo (Semi-Mythical, quite historical) and then I had to stop and start making a voronoi diagram of his empire.

And then I had to cook dinner.

It's been an exhausting day.

Any questions?

My weekly...vent...if you will

Another little Wikipedia fight I had yesterday that I'm not going to try and contest because it's not really that important in the whole scheme of things, just a little service to humanity and dispelling a popular myth, things that I like to do;

For the longest time, the M36 tank destroyer (90 mm Gun Motor Carriage M36) was known as the "Jackson" or "General Jackson", without any true basis for that name. It was believed that the British assigned it that name, but why would the British assign a "General" name (i.e. Sherman, Lee, or Stuart) to a tank or gun motor carriage that they didn't even use? Many other people believed that scale model companies gave the M36 that name when kits of it first came out in the 1970s, following the somewhat logical path that American tank or gun motor carriage = General name. Even as late as 2002, Steven Zaloga believed the name to be "entirely specious", a "postwar invention".

The statement that the M36 was called the "Jackson" was marked as [citation needed] on Wikipedia until somebody (not me) discovered this Ordnance document made available to a wider audience by u/The_Chieftain_WG in December 2012.

The document was cited in a topic in the article talk page as evidence of the vehicle being named that, but was rejected as a "primary source" which is utterly and completely bizarre, given that the evidence is right there. Nothing came of it for two years and I cited the document a few days ago, annoyed by the [citation needed]. My edit was reverted with the message that;

The reference cited proves no such thing, merely that someone had proposed it. Had it been formally assigned, there would other evidence.

Well, there's the problem. The first paragraph of the document, and my edit, very clearly noted that Ordnance was attempting to assign names to vehicles, and the names on the below list (including "Jackson") had been officially assigned or were already in use in the field at the time that the document was published on November 24, 1944.

The text of the document, copied verbatim:

An effort is being made to give popular names to types of Ordnance equipment (in a manner similar to that of the Army Air Forces naming their planes "thunderbolts," etc.) The following list of names have been adopted and will be used in public information releases: [emphasis mine]

TANK AND MOTOR TRANSPORT:

ARTILLERY:

SMALL ARMS:

ROCKETS:

No standard items have nicknames

AIRCRAFT ARMAMENT:

AMMUNITION:

[asterisk] = These are in current use by men in the field

The same editor then proceeds to delete any mention of it ever being named "Jackson" from the article completely, and then goes on about it on the talk page:

First, and most obvious point: the reference says nothing about which Jackson [I did not mention anything about any specific "Jackson", just that it was named "Jackson"] was the namesake, and that may have been deliberate.

More importantly, it does not show that the proposal was actually adopted, [False] only that documents had been made supporting [Technically true, but still false given that it was adopted] it. Given that, if implemented this would have led to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands [It takes months for thing like this to proliferate from the bowels of the Army Service Forces to the relevant press, and it's likely no material with the name was relevant and hence published before the end of the war. The name would not have been used in any official material, as it was not supposed to be, and there's no record of the troops overseas getting wind of it] of examples, it's obvious that the proposal did not go forward. [What? The name was assigned] The cite isn't bad, but it's a primary document [emphasis mine] that flies in the face of -every- contemporaneous secondary one.

Finally, we have the fact that the Germans had assigned the "Jackson" name to the Pershing, moreor less contemporaneously. [citation needed]

He's conflating "assigned" with "actually used". I did not say a thing about the name actually being used in a public information release, just that it was assigned, still very relevant to the article.

It seems like I'll have to publish an official history of the M10 and M36 tank destroyers with this document in the bibliography to get rid of this crud floating around the internet once and for all..

uuuuurgh!

I'm getting into the Reign of Terror in Mike Duncan's Revolutions. Boy is it unsettling!

Not much progress on the Lovecraft front, but got my hands on another piece of history: a "new" gunto.

I'm writing an International Economic History paper on "China, the USSR and Planned Economies". And there is one thing that has been bugging me but I can't really find an answer.

Was Mao Zedong coercive? Obviously Joseph Stalin was. But I'm not really sure if Mao was a bad guy or just a little inexperienced?

Looking for a good history podcast that isn't US history. Right now, I've been listening to a lot of our fake history but is lille something else.

So I bought Battlefield 1, because how could I not get what is, as far as I'm aware, the first AAA game to feature the Great Arab Revolt.

The multiplayer is fun, but it's a historical dumpster fire. Complete hot garbage from end to end.

I spent most of last night out drinking and talking about the historiography of Manx History with a total stranger for three hours. Hopefully he won't steal my views on Illiam Dhone.

I'm pretty uninformed about WW1, but I just started listening to Dan Carlin's podcast on it after the release of BF1 re-inspired me to get to learning. I've found it to be very enjoyable so far, but was wondering what other easily digestible media are out there, maybe documentaries, other podcasts, books.

I'm reading The Thirty Years War by C. V. Wedgwood and am blown away by how great it is from both a historical and literary standpoint. I don't remember where I found it but it doesn't seem to be in the AskHistorians wiki.

Are there any other authors that can keep one captivated like this? I am looking for anything American, European during or after the middle ages, Chinese or Japanese.