Hi I'm Dr Jim Leary from the Uni of Reading in the UK and this is me piecing together a Neolithic flint arrowhead - broken 5,000 years ago and discovered in two pieces by my team five years apart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JKLpTmXefM

I'm going to be giving an AMA on Thursday about my work in the Department of Archaeology and leading a field school for my students and members of the public, and my latest big discovery which was a an Iron Age mound hidden in the foundations of a Norman castle.

See you on Thursday!

Dr Jim Leary @Jim_Leary

Cambridge's History Faculty have uploaded Rosamond McKitterick's valedictory lecture in podcast form on their website. For those of you who don't know her work, she's the recently retired Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge, and a scholar who's extraordinary career revolutionized both the study of the Carolingian Empire and, more broadly, the cultural history of the Early Middle ages as a whole. A huge proportion of the field are ex-students of hers and her work continues to be fundamental to this day. Nothing in the lecture is particularly new, but it's a really fascinating retrospective by a very important historian.

There's also some current affairs* podcasts on the same page, which might be of interest to others on this sub.

^* ^Post-Black-Death, ^that ^is ^:P

I'm trawling for future Tuesday Trivia topics.

Anyone have a post you REALLY want to write, but that perfect question just won't get asked? Why waste the 20 seconds it takes to create an alt account--just take 40 seconds to think of a category it would fit and pitch it as a TT theme!

Especially those of you who haven't earned flair yet. I know you've got a giant stash of knowledge on something or other. :)

After deliberating for a while, I've decided to switch my major to history from economics (i'm still keeping economics as a minor, however)

I won opera tickets this week! Unfortunately they're for a music school production of Madama Butterfly, which I kinda hate... Oh well, free opera, it's like free pizza, even if it's bad, I'm still going to eat it. There is an interesting bit of trivia about this opera though, which it is that it was the only opera you can argue was unofficially banned during WWII by the MET.

In light of recent developments here in Europe that might not receive that much attention on here because after all, there is an election on only a short time from now, I wanted to write something on the issue of how the past is used and a battlefield for social and political conflict.

In 2015, Poland elected a new government under Andrzej Duda, candidate of the Law and Justice (PiS) party. PiS was founded only in 2001 by the Kaczyński twins as a conservative party. In recent years, and even more so after the death of one of the Kaczyński twins in a plane accident, PiS has moved even stronger in the direction of strong right-wing nationalism.

Duda's government was rife with problematic tendencies from the beginning. From immediately pardoning one of the Kaczyńskis' closest business partners after taking office to recent mass protests against a strict abortion law to – in the eyes of the European Union – the highly questionable media law intended to gain control of the state media.

Another very relevant development for people working in my field was Poland's recent law that criminalized claiming that the Polish nation and people collaborated in or were responsible for the Holocaust, which as it was presented in the foreign media was to be ostensibly used against the phrases "Polish Death Camps" or "Polish extermination camps" in reference to Auschwitz or the Reinhard Camps. As the Polish minister of justice, Zbigniew Ziobro, is cited by CNN above: Under the new law "there will be criminal consequences taken against persons who publicly and against the facts say the Polish nation participated, organized, is responsible or co-responsible for committing the crimes of the German Third Reich." The sentence the laws carries is three years in prison at maximum. Saying these things is now libel against the Polish nation and its people.

Historians working in the field of Holocaust studies have looked on this with concern. While nobody seriously working in the field – to my knowledge – has employed the term "Polish death camps" with the intention of implying that Poles were responsible for Auschwitz, the study of local collaboration with the Nazis and of anti-Semitism in occupied and controlled territories is a vast and important area in our line of work.

Now, initial concerns over this law not only overstepping the bounds of freedom of speech in Europe but also being used to silence historians working on the subject of Polish collaboration have been pretty much confirmed, when historian Jan T. Gross came under investigation earlier this year.

Gross is an interesting case: Born in Poland to a Jewish mother and a Christian father, he was involved in the 1968 protests against the socialist government of Poland and as a result had to emigrate to the US where he became a historian who research Polish collaboration and the attitude of war-time Poles. Back in 1996, Poland awarded him the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, the highest order given out to foreigners in Poland fostering the collaboration between Poland and other nations. His 2001 book Neighbors: he Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland is regarded in the field as a pivotal, yet not without criticism and controversy, study of a Polish pogrom against the Jewish population of the town of Jedwabne in 1941.

Now this controversial yet regarded scholar finds himself under investigation for defaming Poland for a comment he made in the German newspaper Die Welt in 2015, namely that "Poles killed more Jews than Germans" in the course of WWII. This slightly misleading quote (the full sentence is "The Poles are rightly proud of their society's resistance against the Nazis, albeit they did kill more Jews than Germans during the course of the war" ) comes from an article of Gross' on the contemporary xenophobia in many Eastern European countries in the context of Europe's recent refugee situation, during which many Eastern European countries such as Poland refused to take in refugees from Syria and Libya.

Read in context, the comment refers to Poles killing a greater number of Jews in the course of their collaboration than the number of German soldiers they killed in the course of their resistance. While a statement that is impossible to verify in my opinion, Gross does put this into a context of acknowledging the great number of Poles who helped Jews, while at the same time emphasizing that those who saved Jews "acted outside the social norms. They were outsiders who had to keep their heroic deeds a secret from their neighbors even after the war – out of fear that they could be ostracized, threatened or killed by their communities. Every occupied society in Europe have participated to a certain extent in the Nazi endeavor of killing the Jews. Every one of them has made certain contributions, dependent on the circumstance and the form of Nazi occupation."

The investigation of Gross is a political move by a right-wing government. If not evident from the actual context and content of his comments, it becomes further evident when seeing that the initial prosecutor dropped the investigation because of lack of evidence for it to be only initiated again by his higher-up. Additionally, while that specific comment of Gross is problematic in as far as it is historically not really possible to verify, taken within the whole article, Gross states something that is quite run of the mill within the field: That every European society under Nazi control had had its collaborators and its part in the Holocaust – a realization that as in other cases such as France or the Netherlands is certainly painful in terms of national identity and myths but has nonetheless taken hold in many a European countries national narrative. Not without controversy and not without historians like Gross calling out national myths but still.

Was asked to revise and expand someone else's article for eventual publication online; there's some good stuff because it's original research, but it's also 20 years old so I had to update the references to whatever's latest. I had considered myself fairly up on the subject - an obscure pulp writer and correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft's I had written about before - but one of the references was something I hadn't run across, and I had to try and hunt it down. It was a pointer to a quotation in L. Sprague de Camp's H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) - the first serious biography of Lovecraft, though considered very flawed when it first came out due to de Camp's judgmental attitude, efforts to psychoanalyze the deceased, and apparent willingness to treat every rumor as fact, and is now basically considered obsolete - but he did do a lot of original research for the book, which included interviews with surviving folks that knew Lovecraft & co. and reading the original letters. The problem is, the particular quotation in question - a letter from Lovecraft (apparently to Robert Bloch, from internal evidence) - isn't cited, and I spent a couple hours going through the relevant sources to see if that letter was ever actually published...and came up with nada. I can still confirm some of the content of the quote because Lovecraft said many of the same things to different correspondents, but it's still frustrating to have yet another "apocryphal" Lovecraft letter hanging out there somewhere.

I posted this in last weeks FFA, but I've been playing Battlefield I since it came out. Entertaining game but my God it's an historical abomination.

I actually thought the Total Biscuit review did a really good job of pointing that out. He doesn't touch on the Middle East campaign in the video, and this might just be my bias for being more familiar with it, but I actually think that one might be the most historically wrong. Like, the problem with the other campaigns is that you are a supersoldier placed in battles that didn't happen but no one is actually trying to contextualize the setting. For the Middle East campaign the narration makes contextualizing historical comments that are just wrong like that the whole thing was about oil. No!

Anyways, I enjoy the multiplayer.

So over the weekend I happened to read an actual English-language book about Finland's Continuation War (1941-44), Finland's War of Choice by Henrik Lunde. As /u/Elm11 , I and others have repeatedly lamented, there's a definite dearth of accessible English sources about this period, so I thought I'd peruse this one to see whether it's any good or not. (I think /u/vonadler and /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov might also be interested so ping to you guys.)

Surprise surprise, it is actually fairly good! I had panned it earlier because Lunde couldn't read Finnish (much) and as a result, relied mostly on English and German sources, as well as the one overview of Finland in the Second World War that's been recently translated (Vehviläinen, 2002, Finland in the Second World War). This shows in the text particularly in Lunde's discussion about Finland's strategic choices and I'll get to that point later, but otherwise the discussion in the book seems fairly spot on. I don't even pretend to be able to criticize the meat of Lunde's work, which is very traditional military history with descriptions of operations and units involved (other than to say that it was readable even for someone who's really not that into military history anymore), so I'll just assume these are broadly accurate - I spotted couple minor inconsistencies but nothing major, although one might want to double check before using Lunde as a gospel about military manoeuvres of the Finnish front.

Lunde devotes quite a bit of space, rightfully so in my opinion, to German operations in Northern Finland; Finnish operations are almost a sideshow. This is good, because the German Lapland front has been almost ignored even in Finnish-language works. There's also quite a bit of "professional criticism" of the campaign: Lunde is a retired officer, and it shows.

So overall, this is a very decent overview about the Continuation War and given the lack of English source texts, it has much to recommend. That said, I thought the reader should be aware that Lunde's lack of access to Finnish discussion has caused some problems. The main issue I have with the book is that Lunde doesn't seem to really understand the political-strategic problem Finland was facing in 1940 and as a result, argues that the Continuation War was "Finland's war of choice" and implies Finland could've avoided being drawn to German sphere of influence and as a hesitant ally in the war. Of course, this interpretation is not totally wrong; but although Lunde has some of the pieces of the puzzle at his disposal, he fails to put them together.

Lunde doesn't really present much analysis of alternatives other than saying Finland could've formed a political union with Sweden in 1940, despite very strong Soviet political and military pressure against the proposal. He argues late in the book that perhaps Finland could've pressed on regardless, but this argument is weak. Lunde does mention the Finnish and German intelligence estimates that predicted the Soviet Union was preparing to finish Finland from August 1940, but he doesn't elaborate on the very strong military pressure the Soviets put on Finland during that time: the defence union between Finland and Sweden wasn't scuppered just because the Soviets made diplomatic noise about it, it was scuppered because the Soviets actually moved combat-ready divisions to Finnish border (very nearly precipitating a general mobilization in Finland) and shot down a Finnish airliner Kaleva, alongside other threatening moves and much noise.

All this caused not just Finns but also Swedes to withdraw the proposal, and it's a bit hard to form a defensive alliance if the partner isn't willing.

Besides, Lunde ignores the fundamental problem facing such an alliance: where would it get its war material from? Sweden's military industry was gearing up and would eventually produce sufficient material to ensure Sweden's neutrality, but it would've been hard pressed to supply the depleted and poorly-equipped-in-the-first-place Finnish army of 1940 as well. Perhaps the Finnish army would've got a priority in Swedish arms deliveries as a result of the alliance, but Swedish army couldn't have been left totally without, since its strength was needed to deter German adventurism. An all too likely outcome would've been two poorly equipped armies between two rapacious dictatorships.

So even the Swedish-Finnish alliance would've been reliant on outside powers for actually equipping the forces required to keep it out from the war. Would the Soviet Union have supplied such weapons? Unlikely, and other sources were cut off once Norway was occupied. The only real option was Germany, and German arms came attached with conditions. Perhaps Finland too could've used her strategic resources, namely nickel from Petsamo, to purchase such arms; but would that have been enough to ensure Finland's territorial integrity once Germany and Soviet Union went toe to toe?

This leads us to the second problem, the nickel mines in Petsamo in the shores of the Arctic Sea. Once Germany occupied the north of Norway, these mines were literally the thin sliver of land that separated the German and Soviet troops in the north. Hitler was nearly obsessed with these mines - late in the war he insisted they be defended even after it was clear the ore couldn't be transported to Germany any longer - and it's all too likely German troops would've moved to occupy them even before Barbarossa. Securing the mines would've required further operations in Finnish Lapland, and therefore Finland would've been likely to be drawn to the war regardless.

And there's the third problem as well. Finland wasn't self-sufficient in food even during peacetime, particularly not if fertilizer and fuel supplies were interrupted and manpower had to be diverted to military and military production. Lunde even mentions two droughts in succession in 1939 and 1940, but his sources apparently don't discuss what this meant in actuality. This is not a surprise because the documents from the Ministry of Supply were long secret, but it's now known that Finland came very close to widespread famine during winter 1942. Mass starvation would've been certain without German food aid; there simply weren't enough calories to go round, and Sweden was struggling as well and couldn't been relied to help much. Even though the food shortage was exacerbated by the 1941 mobilization and war effort, the impact of that wasn't all that significant: the military operations began only after planting season and manpower was released to harvest during autumn months.

Combined, these issues make the Finnish pivot towards Germany fairly understandable in my opinion, and less of a choice than Lunde claims. The Western Allies had shown they couldn't or wouldn't be able to actually deliver help; the Soviet Union was making very threatening moves and expected Germany to hand Finland over in 1940; and the only real alternative, an union with Sweden, was both torpedoed by the Soviets and a dicey proposition in the first place.

Later in the book, Lunde also expresses surprise that Finland didn't understand that she should've been aiding Germany with all her strength in order to win the total war, for example by pressing an attack to cut the Murmansk railway and/or to strangle Leningrad. This shows Lunde doesn't really understand the broader political-strategic perspectives of Finnish leaders at the time, although he makes a decent effort. Both of these operations would've meant a declaration of war from the United States and loss of all hope of leniency in the post-war settlement; the Finnish strategists had little doubt they had to be neighbors with Russia even after the war, despite there having been a short outbreak of unwarranted optimism following initial German successes in 1941. Lunde thinks the Finnish concept of "separate war" is without foundation, but then goes on to describe the precise results of the application of this concept. The "separate war" wasn't about Finland happening to fight a war with the Soviets and the Germans just happening to tag along, as Lunde claims; it was about fighting a war against a common enemy but with distinctly different strategic objectives compared to Germany. Finnish intransigence to German demands and desires regarding the conduct of the war wasn't a bug in the system, it was a feature.

With these caveats, Lunde's book is perceptive and provides a welcome critical perspective to Finnish and German decisions during the conflict. Finnish political and military leadership made some grievous errors during the war, starting from the less than perfectly justified occupation of Eastern Karelia (which caused the United Kingdom to declare war, which did much to cool any remaining enthusiasm for further adventurism that could alienate the Western Allies), and made a near-fatal miscalculation in 1944 in believing that the Soviets wouldn't bother to attack despite all the intelligence indications to the contrary. Discussion of these mistakes and overall concept of operations is good, and even though the focus of this book is on the military history, I still would recommend Lunde's book to all those who can't read more modern texts in other languages - mostly Finnish or Swedish.

Jas. Townsend and Sons covers a Q&A video on 18th century nutrition as well as other topics. I was just wondering how accurate his answers were.

Just picked up Sebastian Conrad's What is Global History in the library today. It's clear enough that Global History as a field is pretty in vogue at the moment, but I've encountered a good amount of skepticism about it from some of my history professors, so I'm interested to read this. Also, I've read works in Global History before but never a theoretical work about GH by an advocate and practitioner of it.

Also eagerly awaiting this week's Reading and Research post! Starting up on some small projects for uni.

If anyone is interested in Asian history or history from a Global perspective I've created a YouTube Channel called Jinyiwei and Samurai that deals with those fields. I'll also be doing book/weapon/armor reviews as well as tutorials on how to make samurai armor. Feel free to check it out, and if anyone has any questions please let me know.

THAT BEING SAID I need material for a series on mysterious artifacts and things from history that have gone missing. Can anyone help me out here?