So, this week I finally bit the bullet and did something I'd been debating for months. I uploaded my entire PhD thesis to my Academia.edu page. In the end, I decided that I would prefer more people had access to it (and that some might actually read it) to the possibility of me getting a few more articles in my CV. My current publication plans don't rely on reiterating what my thesis says verbatim, so I don't think I'm losing much anyway. Besides, I probably won't be taking a full time post in academia anyway.

I thought I'd share it here, as it might be of interest to some of our readers and contributors. Warning, it's long and contains numerous graphs, and the sexy St. Sebastian images may be NSFW :). It's titled The Technological Development of the Longbow and the Crossbow in the Later Middle Ages and can be accessed via that link. If you do read it, I hope you find it interesting!

[...] “Goona-Goona” (acted by natives of the isle of Bali—good as geography, but nothing much as drama) [...]

• H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 25 Jan 1933, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 122

I ran across this and felt it might need some explanation... The 1932 film Goona-Goona, An Authentic Melodrama of the Island of Bali was a kind of ethnological documentary, usually combining genuine footage shot on-location with natives in some exotic land (read: pretty much anywhere that wasn't North America...although I guess Nanook of the North (1922) was an early forebear) with a contrived storyline. Since these were nominally documentaries, they allowed shots of native women with bare breasts, and so the "goona goona" film quickly turned to exploitation, featuring in carnival sideshows well into the 1940s with films like Wild Women of Borneo (1932) and Inyaah, The Jungle Goddess (1934); they started to borrowed fairly heavily from the tropes of H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quartermain stories Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan books (and subsequent films).

One of these films Ingagi (1930), which is currently a lost film, was about a tribe of women that were sex-slaves to a gorilla (despite billing itself as an ethnographic film, most or all of it was filmed in Hollywood using white actresses in blackface). Supposedly, the success of Ingagi led to the production of King Kong (1933).

Do we have a "History Grad Cohort of Fall 2017" yet? US national reply deadline is pretty much here, right?

Who is going to start being EVEN MORE AWESOME next year? Got any questions for the current grads about how to handle the BA=>grad or even MA=>PhD transition?

Congratulations, all!

Last week I said the Bristol Museum was allowing me to use photos of the Los Guachimontones site taken by Adela Breton in the 1890s for my thesis. Well, I received the high resolution scans of the photos. After taking a closer look at the pictures, and using Photoshop to clear some of it up, I think the photos are of Circle 1 and not Circle 2. It is difficult to say for sure since so few photos exist of Los Guachimontones before restoration. I don't know why, but it seems as though Phil Weigand failed to take photos of the site before he began work or he never made the photos available through publication. Identifying the mounds is even more difficult given the fact that the altar of Circle 1 is heavily covered in foliage. In Breton's photos the mounds are cover in some short grass and small trees. I'm a little disappointed that it is Circle 1 rather than Circle 2, but I'm still happy that these photos exist. I'll have to wait to see what my advisor says about them when I send him a revision of my background chapter with the photos included.

In other news, I came across some really old photos of the ruins at Ixtepete in the Guadalajara area.

http://tonala.org.mx/turismo/galeria-de-fotos/antiguas/pages/Ixtepete01_jpg.htm

http://tonala.org.mx/turismo/galeria-de-fotos/antiguas/pages/Ixtepete02_jpg.htm

I collected photos of the reconstructed ruins in this post on Tumblr. What I was actually looking for was photos of the ruins that used to be near Tonala, a suburb of Guadalajara. In the early 1990s the city illegally bulldozed the site to create a municipal dump. I've been searching on and off for some historic photos of the Guadalajara area, especially aerial photos, to see if anyone managed to take photos before it was bulldozed. As it stands, the only information we have on the site comes from Phil Weigand and a rough site map he produced. It's a damn shame Jalisco has neglected its pre-Columbian past for so long. So if any of you know of any good sources for historic photos of Guadalajara/Jalisco, please let me know.

In my latest encroachment into popular history, I try to talk about an important, overlooked question: Did a US nuclear explosion launch a toilet out of a house? (SPOILER: Probably not.)

Has anyone here ever archived historical documents? My workplace has hundreds of historical magazines and other documents relevant to the company dating back 60-70 years. I'm wondering what the process would be (and how much work it would entail) to digitize and preserve this information.

I'm officially on my way to a gap year at the end of my MA, but I'm not as broken up about it as I thought I'd be. I had a crazy short list, one of which I thought would be a total bust but offered me an MA seat. Next year I'll have a better grip on where would be a good fit, a ton of new writing, 3 more conference papers, and maybe even time to throw some papers at a publisher! Freelancing means a flexible schedule and a ton of mobility, so I def won't mind it for another year! Hell, since I'll be back in North America I might even be able to get settled in a city before starting a PhD there.

I was a fantastic secret Hitler and everyone and elected me chancellor. Go me!

Hey , i'm trying to get into history and was wondering what are some of your guy's favorite Wars to read and learn about , that you would suggest

In the Salem witch trials you always here about people being drowned, and if they died they weren't a witch. If they were a witch they wouldn't be killed by the drowning. Was there no point where they realized that the person died every time, so none of them were ever witches or their test was not valid?

And related: if someone was executed as a witch, and then posthumously they realized they were wrong, how was the deceased treated?

I'm curious whether the current decline of religion and rise of secularization in the West (US and Europe) has historical precident. Have other societies in other time-periods gone through similar religious declines? Have any seen religious resurgance afterwards?

Thanks!

After finishing God's Fury, English Fire about the English Civil War, and I'm going to say it, Charles I had it coming.