Congratulations to our newest Interesting Inquirer flair, /u/Casiphoner!

The Middle Ages may have treated curiosity as a sin, but fortunately the 21st century disagrees. We love your inquisitiveness and dedication!

(In disclosure, Casiphoner was flaired last week, and mea culpa, I forgot to post it here until it would have been buried at the bottom).

I submitted my MA thesis today. All that's left is to get my degree in the mail.

Sorry in advance for my English, please try to make sense of my words behind the mistakes :)

Subject : WWII coverage in media/movies/books, nowadays.

Hypothesis : This cultural representation is raising these past years and historical objectivity is barely the point.

Background:

I feel, mark my words, it's a feeling, that there is an excessive amount of focus on WWII and that this focus keep raising in our western societes. By media, I am thinking about movies, books, documentaries, any content. This focus can exist under any form, from objective narration to crazyness remixing nazism.

• question : do you have this feeling too ? do you have objective data to confirm/refute it ?

• todo : I want to parse some movie/book database to count released content on WWII topics along the time axis.

Although its importance and consequences keep declining, while closer historical events' repercussions are still strongly here, although WWII relevance to modern world is lower with every passing day, it seems many released cultural production are focused on it.

Imho, such radicals changes have happened since 1945, 1971, 1988, 2001 and these decades that WWII consequences are not the main reasons of today issues. I know we can always trace back through time to older events but I don't think China rise, environnemental crisis, africa population explosion or Russia current state have much to do with WWII events.

I understand the fascination such a cross countries, huge losses and concentration of singular abominations can cause even 70 years later. But not only do I worry about the sheer quantity of cultural content centered on the WWII, I also wonder if this content is worthy. I wonder if our society has not started idealising WWII times, main personnages and values. I think we are projecting a veil of opinions and trying to find a golden age to contrast with our perceived current days failing societies, corrupted systems.

It seems to me that this is happening at a time where people who lived at the time are almost all dead or unable to vocally defend and contest current appropriation.

Well.

Thanks for having read so far in my ramblings and I really hope you can understand my thoughts better than I can write them down.

I would be happy to read any thoughs on and around this issue. Thank you !

:)

If anybody has time to read this paper and tell me what they think, I would appreciate that a lot. I saw it cited in a book I was reading about political forecasting. I thought it was really interesting but very strange.

For anyone interested, C-SPAN just started airing portions of the Salem Witch Trials Symposium that was held last month. At current they have Margo Burns' section on the documentation airing. On the 29th will be airing Salem Witch Trials 101 by Tad Baker, and a panel discussion on how Salem came to embrace the title "Witch City".

Any historians have advice on majoring in history? I received my associates with highest honors in history just last month, and I couldn't be happier pursuing something I love. But I wanted to see what the general opinion on majoring in history from historians would be.

I'm sorry, everyone, about my biblically proportioned absence. I think I finally fixed my IFTTT applet and hopefully I'll be getting notifications now.

In other news, I'm photographing some new pot sherds that may or may not have new Iron Age inscriptions on them on Tuesday!

They say Hitler wasn't woken up for the d-day invasion because all his underlings were scared to wake up the him up. How true is this, i always thought that Hitler loved to play solider/general and would have enjoyed to be woken up to take command of Germany in her time of need. Were there other instances of Hitler killing members of his staff for something so petty as being woken up. Did he kill people for not waking him up?