For food history in general, the idea that it's all about recipes is the big misconception. Very little is really about recipes; much of it is about ingredients, and a lot more is to do with the cultural significance of different foods. Recipes are about 10% of it, if that.

For Irish food history, it's the complete lack of recognition that the potato is a New World crop. People always boggle when I tell them that Ireland didn't really have potatoes until the 18th century, and a few people have actually tried to contradict me, and tell me that no, the potato has always been in Ireland.

In my research of U.S. armored forces during WWII, several myths and misconceptions pop up time and time again; I do my best to try and beat them down, but some people take a bit more persuading than others. The U.S. Army’s present Armor Branch was created as the Armored Force by order of the War Department on July 10, 1940. It became the Armored Center on July 2, 1943 (losing direct control over its armored corps, which became regular corps) and the Armored Command on February 19, 1944 (with the output of its replacement training center and officer candidate school being subordinated to the Replacement and School Command, Birmingham, Alabama, instead of going through the Chief of the Armored Force).^1 For convenience and to avoid confusion, I will refer to it as “Armored Force” no matter the date.

As you can probably tell, this post turned into something more than I expected it to be.

MYTH: “The Sherman was a death trap for its crews.”

BUSTED: The popular trope of a Sherman bursting into flames if a Tiger looks at it funny and incinerating all five crew immediately doesn’t really hold water. On average, only one man died (usually the one closest to the hit) and one was wounded when a Sherman was knocked out, if that.^2 A majority of Armored Force casualties actually occurred when men were outside their vehicles performing other tasks, (64% in one study of 300 casualties of tank battalions in Italy)^3 and do not factor into statistics of crew survivability when the vehicle itself was hit, such as these.

During the period of 6 June through 30 November, 1944, the U.S. First Army suffered a total of 506 tanks knocked-out in combat (counting both those written-off and reparable). Of these 506 cases, in 104 cases there were no casualties associated with the loss of the tank. In 50 cases the casualties were not recorded. Out of the remaining 352 cases there were 129 KIA (0.37 per tank) and 280 WIA (0.80 per tank), for a total average rate of 1.16 casualty per tank lost in combat.^4

In his book Attrition: Forecasting Battle Casualties and Equipment Losses in Modern War, historian Trevor N. DuPuy studied 898 tanks lost by the U.S. First Army between June 1944 and April 1945;

**Tank Losses and Crew Casualties by Cause (U.S. First Army, June 1944-April 1945):**^5

**Tank Crew Casualties by Crew Position (U.S. First Army, June 1944-April 1945):**^6

*: This number is reduced because the 101 light tanks in the sample did not have a cannoneer, and thus is related to 797 tank losses

**Impact of Tank Burning on Crew Casualties:**^7

ORO-T-117 found a total of 2 to 2.5 casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) in 274 medium tank losses studied; a very important caveat is that 69 percent of these tanks were lost to gunfire, in comparison to the theater average of 54 percent. Even taking the original “small hatch” models into consideration, the Sherman was relatively easy to escape from, unlike the T-34 or Panther, whose hatches were heavy and awkward to use.

Something along the lines of:

<insert_author_here> was screwed up, and their fiction only appeals to boys/adolescents/etc.

One of the drawbacks to serious study of popular fiction is that the popular conception of the artist and their work tends to overshadow the actual work; not only has more fiction been written based on H. P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard's work than either man ever wrote, but the volume of critical material on their fiction outweighs their production - at least by an order of magnitude in the case of Lovecraft. So people saw the Conan the Barbarian (1981) film or the comic books and think Conan is a big, dumb barbarian...which is actually the exact opposite of the actual stories. Barbarian, yes, illiterate muscle-bound idiot, no. We won't even get into the homerotic angle (tl;dr: Frank Franzetta covers sell books, give people many misconceptions).

The myth of the authors tends to get in the way too - partially because early biographical materials tended to highlight their oddities and go into really bizarre posthumous psychoanalytic efforts which were both inaccurate and ill-conceived. It's not enough that Lovecraft was racist, people have to declare he was a virulent racist, that he was mentally unhinged, ruled by his fears, a veritable hermit (despite trekking from Florida to Quebec, from New Orleans to Key West), a mama's boy, a closeted homosexual, morbid and probably diseased... it gets tiresome and difficult to try and correct the image folks have of the writers.

The audience fallacy is a harder prejudice; people still have wiggy ideas about who-reads-what, especially when you get some vapid news story about "Did you know girls are reading comic books?". It also dovetails with overall academic prejudice against popular literature, although that's getting better - with the caveat that there's still feedback between academics and fan scholars (sort of echoing the historian vs. antiquarian divide, I reckon).

So there are plenty to choose from, but in dueling, one I find rather annoying is that dueling was legal in some places (THANKS HAMILTON!!!!). This is definitely not true, and misconstrues the existence of specific laws which attached specific penalties to dueling to somehow mean that the absence of those laws thus meant duels were legal. This isn't how the law works. In the Anglo-American system, in the absence of specific laws which criminalized various aspects of the duel - and not just the actual act, but also preparations such as issuing, conveying, or accepting a challenge - the duel remained a common law offense. Issuing a challenge could be prosecuted for disturbing the peace or incitement, exchanging shots could lead to a charge for assault, and killing was most certainly murder. Actually getting an indictment to happen, let along a jury to convict, was another matter, but the law was the law.

So if those laws existed, what did anti-dueling laws do then? They were intended to attach additional penalties to the duel., and could vary greatly, but all were intended as deterrents. Some dealt with how the body of a duels was to be treated if they died for instance, but in the US, the most popular was disenfranchisement from voting and the holding of public office, as these were things that the type of man who dueled likely cared about, and it was easier to get an indictment for that than for murder.

So to use Hamilton as an example, the duel was not fought there because "Everything is legal in New Jersey", rather it was because in New York, there were anti-dueling laws, while in New Jersey, there were not. Additionally, fighting the actual duel in New Jersey, it was hoped, would create jurisdictional confusion. It did help prevent Burr from standing trial, but Pendleton and Van Ness were both convicted for their role as seconds (as the arrangements had happened in New York without a doubt), and did in fact lose the right to hold public office as a result.

As for other countries, similarly the laws criminalizing dueling were about specific penalties, but their lack didn't make dueling legal. In France, this is most prominent in the late 19th century, by which time all laws dealing with the duel had been done away with, but fatal injury in a duel would still be prosecuted as a murder (in theory. Again, courts didn't like to go along with the law in regards to duels). The practical result was to make French duels relatively harmless, as duelists would generally avoid killing each other, the duel being more about political posturing in most cases.

That is about as close as you can get to dueling being generally legal. There are a small number of pseudo-exceptions, but they are limited, generally, to military laws which nevertheless were in contradiction with civils laws, such as Germany in the early 20th century, or Russia, which is the closest to actual legalization - only for military officers - by the Tzar in 1894. It is often said dueling was legal in Malta, but best I have been able to find from the very limited sources there is that this isn't true, rather there was a specific street that was known as 'the dueling spot' and the law would turn a blind eye to encounters there, the participants claiming it was a random meeting and unexpected attack, and thus self-defense. Uruguay decriminalized dueling in 1920, but it still remained a minor offense, and even then, only after the participants had been through an extensive system of 'honor tribunals' (law remained on the books until 1992, but was last used in 1971 it seems).

So in short, the duel hasn't been legal anywhere for 500 years, give or take.

My least favorite misconception is probably that weapons and armour were made by humble blacksmiths working in their village shops. And not, you know, by highly specialized and highly valued artist/merchant/industrialists working in well organized workshops in the greatest cities in medieval and Early Modern Europe.

But I went over this recently.

Filipo Negroli, Kolman Helmschmied and Hans Seusenhofer had as much in common with a village blacksmith as Caravaggio did with a guy who paints houses.

For me, it would have to be that most other Mesoamericanists do not give West Mexico a second thought unless they are discussing the Postclassic and/or metallurgy. There is this idea that the people of West Mexico did not accomplish much or do much or were even closely related to eastern Mesoamerica. Most of the time it is because people never stop to read the literature. Sometimes it is because there is proportionally less research conducted in this region compared to other regions. I try to tell people that West Mexican cultures are like cousins. They may not be as closely related as your siblings (Teotihuacan, Aztec, Maya, Zapotec, Olmec, etc), but they share many of the same features that are just expressed a little differently than you are use to.

Most people don't care anyway.

The biggest direct misunderstanding in fashion history is, of course, that corsetry was a torture enforced on women, who either hated it all the time or developed a false consciousness that gave them pride or comfort in it. It grates my cheese - it just really grates my cheese. Grrr! In large part because this idea is so ingrained in the modern psyche that there's very little to be done about it: it generally takes an in-depth, one-on-one conversation where I gradually prove to the individual that I know what I'm talking about, and I can't do that to every single person out there. There are even people who know me personally, who know how much time I've spent studying these eras, who will not believe me. But apart from a very, very small group of women (some who were fetishists or catered to fetishists, some who deliberately cultivated an awe-inspiring, "unreal" image), corsets were worn mainly for bust support and to give a particular respectable silhouette. To quote from my own blog post:

For another, extant historical corsets do not show extreme reduction. A study of the 18th century stays in the Colonial Williamsburg collection show a range of 24" to 30+" waist circumferences (a range completely ordinary among uncorseted women today). Examining the patterns of extant 19th and early 20th century corsets in Norah Waugh's Corsets and Crinolines, most have waist measurements around 20", at the larger end of the measurements that disgust modern people; however, they also show bust and hip measurements that appear extremely small from a modern perspective. Altogether, they present a picture of women who were generally slimmer than today, lacing tightly enough to achieve a figure more curved than it would naturally have been, but not to any kind of extreme.

The pattern company McCall's sizing chart does not go down to a 20" waist, but the dimensions for a modern, uncorseted woman can be extrapolated from the smallest size to be about 27.5-20-29.5, with a 68% waist:hip ratio and 73% waist:bust ratio. (Please bear in mind that a smaller ratio means a larger difference in measurement.) Meanwhile, Waugh's corsets have waist:hip ratios from 62.5% to 70.5% and waist:bust ratios from 59% to 71% - generally more curvacious than someone with a natural twenty-inch waist, obviously, but not by that much. The examples in Jill Salen's Corsets are generally more workaday and less fashionable, with waist:bust ratios of 66.7% to 87.2% and waist:hip ratios of 73.3% to 84%.

Comparing the numbers, these corsets show little more curviness than would be expected from a comparable woman today. A 20" waist sounds sensational to us, because we pair it with "normal" modern bust and hip measurements: according to the CDC, the average American woman has a 37.5" waist - according to McCall, this would give her a bust of about 44.5" (84.3%) and hips of about 46.5" (80.6%); a roughly size 10 woman with a 30" waist likely has a bust of 38" (78.9%) and hips of 40" (75%). The women who laced to 20" were simply smaller than we are overall, with bust measurements that resemble our underbust measurements. Given this, the potential of even slimmer teenagers lacing without much difficulty to 18" or even 16" does not seem so implausible.

(Further posts in the series I wrote on the topic are here, here, and here.)

Just yesterday, I put a late 1840s dress onto a form that I'd custom-made - not for this specific garment, but to be small enough to fit a decent range of pieces, with ~28" bust and ~19" waist. The dress doesn't quite fit ... in the bust. There's space in the waist, but the original wearer was close to flat-chested. But if I tell someone, "So here's this dress, it's got a 22" waist and a 26" bust," they're inevitably going to respond to the waist measurement. If I posted a picture of it on the dress form to a Facebook page like Vintage News or History in Pictures, I'd inevitably get hundreds of comments about how the wearer must have tortured herself with a corset to fit into it. The idea that many extant garments are so small because the wearers were skinny minnies is just ... inconceivable.

In a broader sense, there's a related sort of indirect misunderstanding about the field, which mainly consists of a "they were just like us" fallacy. Simply put, they weren't. People in the past had a different relationship with their clothing: clothes weren't cheap, they were often fitted closely to the body, mending and altering were hugely important, and idiosyncratic personal style was seen as eccentric. Fashion history has a very broad appeal because we all wear clothes, but that seductive connection makes people overlook the fact that historical attitudes toward fashion and clothing take just as much research and interpretation as historical attitudes toward everything else.

I've written a few /r/badhistory posts over the years on some big misconceptions - here's one on why 1910s corsetry wasn't about pushing up the bust, one on why Chanel didn't have that big of an effect on 1920s fashion, and one on why the idea of Regency/Directoire women dampening their petticoats or gowns is a myth.

I have a Degree in Intel and one of my first researches was about the lack of Intelligence preparedness and failure in preventing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in Dec 1941.

Myth: US intelligence failed to see the attack and in popular culture there is even a myth that was all a plot to let the US into the war.

Reality: There was a US Naval Intel group in 1941, the so called Black Chamber (Cypher Cabinet) although it was small, a handful of experts in cryptography and mathematics. Long story short, this group was already reading Japanese encrypted traffic in 1941 and could have found about the Japanese attack. The key however is that at the context of the time and the limited resources available it was chosen to focus on the Japanese Diplomatic traffic instead of the IJN traffic. US Navy Intel was successful in breaking many parts of this traffic but the lack of attention in IJN traffic made them miss the attack preparations which otherwise may have been discovered.

*IJN: Imperial Japanese Navy

That musket-age warfare was illogical or stupid. Especially regarding the more or less nationalistic arguments that come out of the American War for Independence: the redcoats were a bunch of thoughtless automatons marching in lockstep and getting shot down in droves by heroic American minutemen, who hid behind rocks and trees!

It doesn't take much to clear away all that nonsense, of course, but so little people ever bother. The comforting notion that not only did the US win against the British, but that they did it because there was something innately superior about the American way of life that made them peerless warriors and tacticians as well as having the moral high ground... it gets into uncomfortable territory pretty quickly.

In addition to the nationalistic elements, there's also the simple fact that the comforting, patriotic story is less compelling than the truth. The War for Independence was a rollicking cart throughout its duration, and the fact that it didn't tip over when it easily could have on multiple occasions is part of what makes it so fascinating to study.

The same sort of attitude projects itself into the War of 1812, which casts the British as the jaded villain back for revenge, and it takes Andy Jackson and a swamp full of pirates to set things to rights again! The "second war of independence" angle is still something that is considered a publishable subtitle, nevermind that it completely runs over any of the nuance that the war needs to stand on its own as a period of history that could teach us something.

I'm a labor historian. Sort of. While I'm certainly interested in questions of work, the working class, and the ways in which capitalism has shaped American society, I'm not the standard politically.

Most folks hear 'labor historian' and immediately go to an image of a perpetually-protesting, scraggly-looking person who disdains most of society as uneducated oafs who have bought the lie and call for revolution or whatever.

I don't. Usually. OK, most of the time. Beards are winter-wear for me. And I do enjoy the occasional protest.

Perhaps I'm what Jack Metzgar would call a 'chickenshit liberal,' or perhaps it's my not-quite-fully-repressed Catholic upbringing, or, perhaps, well, whatever.

I've resigned myself to a push for what some call 'slowcialism,' the sort of Fabian-style, incrementalist push to a society that is more democratic, more equal.

When asked about my politics, I answer that I'm a 'practical radical.' I'd love to see society change to something much more egalitarian, but after reading hundreds (thousands?) of books on failed lefty movements, I've come to accept that for better or worse, the larger American population just doesn't want a socialist society. At least not yet (or not a society labeled as such, but that's a separate discussion.)

Sure, you can argue that The State repressed lefty movements (see all of the HD 8031 section at your university library,) you can argue that Big Business et al fought hard to persuade folks that The American Way is the best way. And you'd be correct. But at the end of the day, 125-ish years have passed since lefty movements began to pop up in the US. To blame the state or business for their failures is to elide a long, hard look at what Americans really want.

/rant. gears fully grinded.

That there is no history in the Pacific or that oral traditions are somehow less honest than paper archives.

When not in the Pacific, I hesitate to even explain my usual geographical research focus as people just assume the ocean is empty and not much happened till it was used as a theater in WW2.

The biggest one: The Civil War being about something called state's rights is the kind of line that never seems to die. I think after multiple nuclear wars, the first chitters out cockroach peoples' mandibles might be "it was state's rights!"

What has really ground my gears for the past several months has been the incessant refrain that nonslaveholding whites, especially poor farmers, were some combination of 1) totally screwed, 2) so dumb they fell for the plantocracy's con job of white supremacy despite it doing nothing for them, and 3) this prevented them from uniting with the slaves in some kind of revolutionary proletarian movement.

Only the third of these is even close to being so, in that there's precious little multiracial political activity in the antebellum South, but it hits the rocks fast. For it to hold water, one has to assume that the most natural, obvious, correct way for people on the lower end of the economic scale to behave is to read their Marx and go to work. It's been a hundred sixty-nine years; I think we can put that idea to bed and we owe ourselves better than just dismissing anyone who doesn't behave like we do as dupe or stooge for the Man.

This leads to uncomfortable and sometimes inconvenient questions. What if white supremacy is a kind of property in itself? What if capital accrues in other than strictly material means? What if white supremacy did give material rewards, as well as psychological and social ones, to poor whites? If all of those are so, and I think it's pretty clear that they are, then supporting white supremacy and the plantation regime is actually the correct choice, at least in general, from a strictly self-interested POV. The planter propagandists oversold how classless white society was, but they're not entirely wrong.

That makes support of a horrific regime into something rational, which I think a lot of people have trouble accepting. Rational things, we're taught, are good things. It's easier to believe millions of people were too stupid or ignorant to know their own best interests in this noxiously hegemonic, I almost want to say colonialist, way of thinking. It puts one into that familiar place where white people doing bad things suddenly lose the agency we otherwise accord them.

Drives me nuts.

There's been a bit of confusion around the invention of "email." This pops up every so often because one person who claims to have invented it -- Mr. Ayyadurai. It is true that Mr. Ayyadurai wrote a program in the late 1970s literally named "EMAIL" but it is worth noting that there are plenty of earlier works that match the concept of electronic mail (a message with a subject, body, recipient list, and also routable between computers). Ray Tomlinson in 1971 did just that by updating SNDMSG (and use of the @ symbol to designate that the recipient was on a different system). The IETF in 1973 published RFC 561 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc561 which was an early form of what we now use today.

The misconception is such that Time and the Washington Post both have run stories crediting Mr. Ayyadurai but both publications have had to issue corrections.

There are two, and they're kind of related- tattoos have always been considered deviant and tattoos are "acceptable"

1. Tattooing was always considered for "bad people" or the dregs of society. I hit on this a bit when I wrote a little about my "party story", but at the later part of the 1800s it was an upper class (as well as sailor) thing for tattooing. Samuel O'Reilly's tattoo machine in the 1880s (at least starting at about that time) and the invention of "flash" made the method of expression much more widespread and cheaper- this then made it an expression along class lines and the wealthy tended to avoid the practice.

This changed a bit in 1932 with the Lindbergh kidnapping when some parents wanted to tattoo their children for easier identification. In 1955 when the Assistant Secretary of Defense suggested the populace have their blood type tattooed in case of a Soviet attack.

2. The 1950s was also the beginning of the US depiction of tattoos as being deviant. Prisoners and motorcycle gangs began to adopt tattoos as a mark of their time and culture- much like the class lines of the late 1800s and even today (middle/upper middle class "art" tattoos vs more simple lower class versions vs fine line/single needle styles). This time frame also brought along the negative connotations with the horrors of the Holocaust. Using tattoos to mark the self as an outsider of the norm continued through the 70s and 80s.

So the biggest common misconception would be the "acceptability" of tattoos- though it has been getting better. A person with tattoos is far more acceptable than a "tattooed person"

The Welsh didn't invent the longbow. We'll skip straight past the fact that bows of roughly six foot in length have existed since pre-history, and there are several surviving examples to prove it, and go on to why this fact is widely believed.

Near as I can tell the thesis of the Welsh origin of the 'English longbow' came about sometime in the late 19th century. Oman made passing references to it in his works on medieval military history (published 1885 and 1898), but the strongest argument for it came from J.E. Morris in his Welsh Wars of Edward I, published in 1901. In this book, Morris takes an extended tangent from his discussion of Edward's conquest of Wales, to talk about how the crossbow (a weapon he holds in middling regard) was eventually replaced by the pinnacle of medieval weaponry: the longbow.

The argument has two main components. The first is based in the observation that the English adoption of the longbow seems to have occurred sometime toward the end of the reign of Edward I, after his conquest of Wales. It is very tempting to see some sort of cause and effect here. The second bit of evidence comes to us courtesy of Gerald of Wales. Well...courtesy of a probable misreading of Gerald of Wales. Gerald included several fun little anecdotes about the power of Welsh bows in his Journey through Wales. This included an account of arrows being shot with such force that the heads penetrated through a stout wooden door (Gerald saw the arrowheads himself!), as well as an account of a battle where an unfortunate mounted soldier took an arrow through each of his legs, and found himself stuck to his saddle! Morris, and subsequent historians who subscribed to this theory, believed that this was strong evidence supporting the presence of an all powerful bow in Wales at this time (which, we should note, was almost a century before Edward's conquests) that had somehow remained a secret to neighboring Englishmen.

This argument has some...flaws, but there's an even bigger problem for it. You see, at one stage Gerald actually describes the Welsh bows he saw. I don't have the quote to hand right now, but in short he remarks with great surprise that they are neither made of yew, nor of composite materials (the exact translation of this second part is the matter of some light debate), but instead are made of elm. This raises two problems. Firstly, the great war bow of Hundred Years War fame was made of yew, not elm. This is a matter of some significance, as the type of wood used for a bow is rather important. Secondly, by noting that the bows are not made of yew, Gerald is suggesting that he knew that bows were made of this same wood, suggesting that England was probably already making yew bows at this time.

Exactly why England adopted the longbow in such vast numbers in the Later Middle Ages is a topic we could probably debate forever, but it seems pretty clear that it was not the result of discovering some long lost super technology in the depths of Wales.

People calling the Meiji restoration "a bloodless revolution." Sometimes, they're kind enough to call it a "nearly/mostly bloodless revolution" or "relatively bloodless." It's part of a mythology around the event that started in Japan, and was taken up in the West. There's a lot that goes into this myth. The shogun really did officially yield up power to the Emperor without a fight. And under that shogun, Edo (now Tokyo) really did surrender to the Imperial army without a battle. But there was a full-fledged battle in between those two events, for heaven's sake, and that battle was only the beginning of the Boshin War.

The Boshin War wasn't the longest or bloodiest conflict, compared to the roughly contemporaneous American Civil War and Taiping Rebellion. But at least 8,000 people were killed in the fighting, and in the worst arena of the war, the northern domain of Aizu, a horrifically large number of the victims were non-combatants, who either committed suicide in the face of invasion, drowned, starved, or were killed by artillery. The Boshin War had a huge impact on the culture and memories of the regions where it happened.

Furthermore, to focus on just the events of the months just before and after the Restoration event is missing the context of violence that brought about the Restoration itself. The Mito civil war, the Kinmon no Hen, the bombardment of Shimonoseki, the Second Choshu Expedition, the campaigns of terrorism on the streets of Kyoto, Edo, and Osaka: the path towards the Restoration was one of violence.

As it stands, books about this period's history now only bring up the old "bloodless revolution" canard to debunk it, but it's still quite active in the wide world, and is very annoying.

On the military side of the American Civil War, the idea that the introduction of the rifle musket revolutionized tactics and led to greater bloodshed has been driving me up the wall for years. This general problem comes up a lot in military history; people always want to identify changes to warfare with changes to technology, when it's just not that simple. When the American Civil War is so bloody, and battles indecisive, people attribute it to the rifle; when the deadlock on the Western Front finally breaks, people chalk it up to the tank.

People have pointed out the rifle's superior effective range against the smoothbore musket -say, 300 yards vs 150,- and from there extrapolate that this caused the high casualties of the American Civil War. However, the issue is much more complicated.

First, one has to establish that casualties were indeed unusually high. On a per-battle basis, though, this seems to run into trouble; armies suffering 20-25% casualties hasn't been that unusual since the ancient world, not to mention the Modern Period. Overall, 650,000 dead is quite high, but it's important to remember that the lion's share died of disease, and moreover, that this was spread across four years of warfare.

Both sides mobilized immense numbers of men to fight; what delineates the ACW from previous American wars is less the ferocity of the fighting, and more its sheer scale. More than two million donned the blue, and nearly a million the grey. It's only natural that larger armies see more casualties; there are more men shooting both ways.

It is also unclear what impact the rifle actually had on combat; whatever a weapon is theoretically capable of, it can only be as accurate -and thus deadly- as the man firing it. Marksmanship was by and large not a part of the ACW rank-and-file's training; the necessary skills, such as range and wind estimation, were not in their toolbox. Given the low velocity and projectile weight of black powder weapons, range estimation was crucial; it did not take long for gravity to drastically affect the bullet's trajectory. A round sighted for 300 yards would pass right over your head at 200. Given the long stretch of 'dead space' (about 125 yards, between 100 yards and 225) where bullets would pass overhead, most commanders did not bother with long range firing at all. They furthermore felt that close range fire was more impactful, and a better use of ammunition. By and large, combat remained within the ranges customary for smoothbore muskets since the days of pike and shot. Neither did rifle armed troops actually hit a significantly higher fraction of their shots than smoothbore armed troops in previous periods; comparing rounds expended to casualties inflicted, as in the wars of Frederick the Great and Napoleon, producing a single enemy casualty often took hundreds of rounds.

The rifle musket did not make the defender's firepower superior, and thus make attacks more likely to fail; as has been shown, there's no reason to believe that a frontal assault would come under greater fire than in previous eras where they had been reasonably reliable. They were not under fire longer, nor was the fire more accurate than past armies experienced. What was different, though, was the near-total lack of a large, experienced Regular Army that could facilitate expansion. Instead, almost the entire army, from privates at least up through colonels, came straight out of civilian life, which did not facilitate the development of specialized combined arms tactics and iron discipline under fire.

There's an undercurrent of nationalism in this too; it's similar to what u/partymoses mentioned about the American revolution. It's a common trope to invoke comparison's to WWI when remarking on the use of earthworks in the ACW. Americans will chastise European armies as if they were stupid for 'not learning the lessons' of the ACW, thus leading to the bloodshed of WWI. Nevermind the other, more relevant wars they observed, such as the Franco Prussian War, which was fought almost entirely with breechloading rifles and with steel artillery. Nevermind that the American war was fought almost entirely with militia grade troops.

Technology does not determine tactics, it simply provides options that can be chosen from. In the case of the ACW, Americans had waived the choice with their refusal to establish a large standing army prior to the war.

The intersection of history with contemporary events means that there are lots for me. I initially had a couple more, but because I can see that everyone else has stuck to the worst of the worst I've only cheated slightly in having two.

Here are some markers that whatever I'm about to read is going to be not great:

• "Sykes-Picot borders" or "Sykes-Picot 2.0". I've written about this extensively. Sykes-Picot did not draw the borders of the Middle East with a small handful of exceptions where the final borders matched the Sykes-Picot lines. Insofar as it is inevitably brought up in relation to contemporary Iraq and Syria its especially wrong given how wildly differently those territories appear under Sykes-Picot.
• "Islam/Islamist/Salafist/Wahhabist/Jihadist" - There's a lot of confusion around these terms. I think each of them has technical analytical merit, but they're often thrown around in popular discourse in a way that's confusing at best, and quite often misleading. This is also true among Muslims. There was a thread on twitter that went viral a few weeks ago about how "Wahhabism" doesn't exist and it's actually just a kind of Hanbalism. I would disagree, as did ibn Abd al-Wahhab's own brother who if I recall correctly was himself a Hanbali scholar. I think there's also been a backlash by some who don't know the technical meaning of the term against the word "Islamist." I am not opposed to Islamism per se, though I know people who are and I think it's a coherent point of view, but it is explicitly not the same thing as opposing Islam and I don't think it's bigoted. There are plenty of Muslims who are among the most vehement anti-Islamists, notably the governments of the UAE and Egypt. I might challenge some of his points but I thought Hassan Hassan's recent article on how discussing Islamic extremism is oddly somewhat easier to do in the Middle East because these terms are better understood and there's less nervousness about causing accidental offense had a lot of merit to it.

My field is Early Medieval Europe, specifically Anglo-Saxon England. My bête noire is the phrase "Dark Ages" and everything associated with it. Every time I explain my thesis is on ninth-tenth century England, I get some variation on "How? They didn't write anything down back then!" or "Oh yeah, like on the Vikings! How badass was Ragnar Lothbrook in real life?!" which usually ends up descending into a discussion about how much I detest the wide proliferation of "Viking Culture" neo-Pagan fanwank pages on Facebook, the fact that most popular conceptions of the Vikings are wildly inaccurate, and the Victorians ruined everything.

For some context, I have a lot of different research interests that all kind of intersect at one particular point (conflicts in the post-Soviet North Caucasus, a pretty under-researched topic), but I am interested in the larger contexts, which leads me to looking at facets of Islamic history, Russian language/culture/history and in particular its conquest of the Caucasus, and terrorism/counterterrorism studies and to some larger extent conflict studies in general. Each one has some serious misconceptions, which probably fueled my desire to study them in an academic context (going back to school in the fall after being in a completely different career path for awhile), so I'm not just wasting the knowledge I've been able to cobble together.

• Islamophobia, particularly (though not limited to) when looking at historic studies of the North Caucasus. I may have mentioned this in the past, but every academic source I've found that I thought was reliable has laid this out as a major problem in the field in the first couple of pages. Russia has long used the othering of Islam to justify the conquest and subjugation in the people of the North Caucasus, and this attitude pervades in many historical accounts. It sometimes leaks into Western historians' and political scientists' views as well, which is frustrating. A general sense that any Islamic society is inferior to the West, or prone to violence and ruin undercuts a lot of what could be productive study of the regions in question.
• Terrorism discussions given in popular media and political discourse are usually far too narrow in scope. Far too often it is never recognized that terrorism is an old and wide-ranging conflict tactic and not just something scary Muslims use to wreak havoc on the West. If you really want to understand terrorism, you need to break it down by country and time period, and start thinking in state vs. non-state actors. It is not central to any one religion or ideology, and in certain places, there's a very fine, blurry line between political party, human rights group, and terrorist organization. And very often, the grievances of the group are legitimate. I think that's the one point that most often gets lost in popular news coverage. Most of the time, groups have specific aims and political goals, but pseudo-intellectuals and war hawks would have you believe that all they want to do is run around and cause chaos. A lot of times, in a lot of places, groups are resorting to guerrilla tactics out of lack of other options, after experiencing years if not decades or centuries of oppression by their governments. The fact that the mainstream media tends to focus solely on a few outliers committing isolated attacks in the West that often come from a diaspora community skews the focus to entirely the wrong places. Consider that if the American revolution were to happen today, those fighting for independence would be called terrorists. They're only considered freedom fighters in the annals of American history because they won.
• And there's the common misconception that every terrorist group of a certain stripe (the obvious example being Islam-based) wants exactly the same thing, which could not be farther from the truth. That's why so many groups split into different factions and end up fighting each other.
• I see a lot of cultural stereotypes and misconceptions about Russians as well as a general misunderstanding that once the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia did not magically transform into a functioning Western democracy. That's finally being addressed in public discourse due to certain current events, but I think it's been something that's been ignored for far too long in the popular consciousness.
• The amount of racial confusion about people from the North Caucasus is pretty baffling though I suppose a touch amusing. This has highlighted to me what a social construct the concept of race is. In America, it is focused rather exclusively on skin color, but in other parts of the world, other markers can come into play. Most Russian citizens are light-skinned, for example, so I've read that a derogatory term for Caucasians is "black," not referring to their skin tone but their hair (as they tend to have darker hair and eyes than the average Slav). Still, every person from the North Caucasus I've ever seen has read as "white" to me (and I've seen photos of light-haired and eyed ones as well), but regardless I've read descriptions of them as dark-skinned or "swarthy." I can draw parallels to my own ancestry, in which stories from my parents have indicated that my Italian and Armenian grandparents were once not considered "white" in America, but that seems to have changed in a modern day setting, probably as America's immigrant community grew more diverse. This line of thought may be more in the sociology field than history, but I find it fascinating nonetheless.

Wrote my master's degree paper on French influence in post-colonial Africa.

I "love" how African leaders are portrayed as corrupt and dictatorial "by nature", in a thinly veiled racistic theory that Africans aren't as good as the white man. And it's both horseshit and tied to post-colonial policies.

But the truth is, you actually had a couple good leaders in Africa. Leopold Sedar Senghor. Thomas Sankara. Patrice Lumumba. But they tend to have a quick and strange death, because it isn't really convenient for everyone. Sedar Senghor stayed in power for a while because he had very close ties to France, and accepted the fact that Paris was a major player which had influence over Central and Western Africa.

Meanwhile, the two other ones were strongly in favor of total national independence and embraced the Third Worldism ideology, and defied the former colonies ; Sankara because of his Marxist tendencies, and Lumumba who fought against the Katanga rebels, who were largely supported by Western European nations, chiefly Belgium, and received the help of thousands of white mercenaries.

The corruption in high ranked political positions in Africa, especially in the former French colonial empire, is often due to the fact that it's very convenient for the former colonists, who can enjoy a closed market for export, and a personal supplier for import. I mean, look at the last French military operations in Africa, and look at the resources present in these countries. They all have oil, gold and/or uranium. Especially uranium.

I'm ranting about France and Central/Western Africa, but it's very present in the Eastern and Southern parts of the continent, too ; this time, it's either because of Cold War rivalries having terrible consequences (see Zimbabwe's Mugabe, supported by China to destroy white power-based, Western-aligned Rhodesia) or because of purely economical interests that lead to private companies supporting a dictator, which means that there won't be any UN effort to remove the guy (see Uganda's Museveni, who's concurrencing Saudi Arabia in LGBT persecution but sells oil for cheap).

The religious factor is to take into account, too, especially in Eastern Africa. Muslim and Christian populations are often led by their ministers to support the leaders as "God's choice". This is very present, for example, in Uganda, where the government allows lynching of LGBT people (publicising the names of known homosexuals in newspapers, and then letting the population do whatever they want), and American evangelical churches, who are booming in the region, are having a field day, and use this "divine purification" as a proof that Museveni is here by the will of God.

tl;dr African states are led by corrupt dictators because everyone else wants it this way.