This week I returned from 2 weeks in Japan, my first time visiting. It was a pretty cool trip. I spent the first five days or so in Hiroshima doing "work" (workshops, talks), and some tourism which I discussed on my blog here. (I have more blog posts to write...) I then went on to Kyoto, where I gave another talk and did some more looking about, and then Tokyo (the same). All were wonderful and fascinating and each city distinctly different from the other. And compared to NYC, Japan is not as expensive as I had assumed (but maybe that's because my brain is warped by NYC pricing). I'm back in NYC now and (still!) somewhat recovering from the 13 hour (!!) time difference, but the trip was really wonderful, useful, informative.

While I was there, North Korea and the USA started talking nukes again so I was in high demand despite the time difference's difficulties. (I was in the admittedly luxurious position of telling many high-profile news publications that I couldn't help them, because, as I put it, while Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un can do many bad things, I won't let them ruin a vacation abroad if I could help it!) I've posted some of the coverage here — I was happy that I was able to redirect some of the inquiries to my other project collaborators.

The strangest thing to occur during the trip was having a NYT columnist write about some of my work, including the paper I had just given a few days before in Hiroshima (I sent her a copy at her request). Good timing to study nukes, I guess. The paper in question (which came out of some early thoughts I had about what I have taken to calling "the Kyoto misconception" or "the Kyoto decision") is something I am fairly proud of and will appear in an edited volume scheduled to come out in 2020, but I am hoping to find a way to post an early version of it (e.g. a pre-print) before then, if my editor friends will let me, because I think it is an important contribution to the literature on the history of the atomic bomb. The short version: the decision not to bomb Kyoto was the decision that Truman actively made about the atomic bomb, and there is plausible evidence that it contorted his understanding about what kind of target Hiroshima was and what human consequences the bombings would have, in a way that had important postwar implications for the establishment of the nuclear taboo and the military-civilian nuclear divide. Heady stuff!

I am hoping to launch a new web app in the next week or so, something of a cousin to NUKEMAP, and also to add one provocative new feature to NUKEMAP... stay tuned...

And classes start again in two weeks! The summer has been fun and surprisingly productive but I think it is officially over, at least after my visit to the Midwest see the eclipse (and my in-laws) has been completed. I'm excited about the new semester though; not so much the prospect of going back to teaching (I have not even started to think about my classes, though fortunately both are repeats; the summer just ran by at unfathomable speed), but I ran a job search last semester and hired two new historians of science/technology, and I am excited about the prospect of further developing our little scholarly community at my institution.

My free-for-all is on Iberian history: At the suggestion of the /r/history mods, I'm posting a link to a podcast series I started last year for the School of History at University College Dublin: http://historyhub.ie/kingdom-empire-and-plus-ultra

We call it 'Kingdom, Empire & Plus Ultra: Conversations on the History of Spain, 1415-1898'. I basically interview scholars on a variety of topics on Iberian history. It's still relatively new (just over a year old), but it is getting a nice response from people. Our latest interview was with Prof. Barbara E. Mundy of Fordham University on Tenochtitlan after the Spanish conquest.

So, if you guys are interested in Spanish or Portuguese history podcasts, check this out - the publicity is always good for us! If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know here. I'm also on Twitter: @ejpcollins

History Hub itself is a larger project by the School of History and has a wide range of podcasts on different areas of history. They're also on Twitter: @HistoryHub_ie (I'm not in charge of the website or the Twitter account)

Thanks guys. Edward.

Edit: by the way, this Reddit account is new, as you'll see. I'm a regular user under a different personal account.

Edit 2: Forgot to mention - you can also get this on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ie/podcast/kingdom-empire-plus-ultra/id1123198615?mt=2

So I'm not actually a historian. I'm primarily an English Lit student focusing on Medieval literature. So today, I started in on a new book Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling by Leonard Michael Koff. I instantly disliked it. By 20 pages in, his claims were frustratingly broad, his evidence was sparce and his understanding of Medieval Literary Theory seemed... limited. I had picked up this book at a used academic bookstore for $10, so only now did I look up reviews. And those reviews are what bring me to you today, because they are delightfully savage. I take a perverse pleasure in reading negative reviews, and by academic standards these were... harsh. Amusingly so. Here are some highlights.

Most readers will not notice immediately that Koff's index lists one "Betsey Bowdan." He misspells only my first name in his text, however (p. 245), and does not discriminate against recently published authors: he calls Rossell Hope Robbins "Russell" in the index, which provides a reference to only one of Robbins's two appearances.

Well that's an inauspicious beginning. After explaining that there are also several errors in the Middle English, she goes on to say

Blame for the book's shortcomings should by no means be shifted to California copyeditors, however. Primarily, Koff lacks evidence for his argument.

Well that's abrupt. Essentially, the basis for this whole book is some very specific ideas about how Chaucer's works would be read/performed. Those ideas come from a couple of depictions of reading in Chaucer, and one illustration in a manuscript. Let's go to the review.

If Koff were to pause to glance beneath his precarious footing, though, he would find thin air indeed. In one breathless paragraph he does confess the dearth of evidence: "Declamation, as we know, was the medium of Chaucer's textual community, although no reference in his work [or elsewhere] clearly indicates which narratives were in fact declaimed — whether all of them, some of them, or parts of some of them — or clearly establishes the actual circumstances and expectations of a public reading? where it took place, whether it was a special occasion, who was actually present, whether there were pauses during the reading or discussion of the reading afterwards, and how attentive the audience was or was expected to be" (p. 66).

Later, he is described as having an "antipathy toward evidence", and his work would apparently be a usable bibliography/scholarship despite that, except he doesn't provide a bibliography and "Because references to relevant material must be excavated laboriously from footnotes and muddy text, however, most readers' time would be better spent skimming annotated bibliographies in Studies in the Age of Chaucer and elsewhere."

Lest you think this is merely the pique of one scholar who's pissed he got her name wrong, here are some other choice bits from other reviews.

'Participatory thinking' on a text is all very well, but it is necessary to understand the text first, and it sometimes seems that Professor Koff's grasp of Chaucer is not sure

Here's another:

The theoretical discussion is full of the most puzzling kinds of assumption about what a manuscript is.

And some more:

On the other hand, I have considerable reservations with this kind of book, which seems to me to be rather far from the actual poems Chaucer wrote. It is part of that general stream of semi- (or pseudo-) philosophical moralizing which takes its basis in literature and which is fairly common today

There were some more positive views, but even the best reviews were lukewarm, and the negative reviews... Well let's just say I don't think I'll be finishing that particular book.

So the Japanese loli thread a week or two back had me hunting for sources, and I ended up with a copy of Permitted and prohibited desires : mothers, comics, and censorship in Japan. It's a cultural study, so more anthropology than history or literary criticism, but so far it hits some good points. I just got it on Tuesday and have barely gotten through the introduction, so it's a long road toward the main point of interest:

Chapter 7 concludes the book and is a multilayered analysis of Article 175, the law against obscenity that has remained basically consistent since its inception during Japan's period of modernization. It's injunction against the realistic depiction of genitalia (including public hair) seems mysterious given that, under the same law, almost every other sexual or bodily depiction, including sadomasochism and analism, is permitted. I question the nation of "obscenity" here, tracing how it allows for a very real policing of mass media at the national and public borders of Japan as well as produces pubic fantasies in very particular forms. My conclusion is that the sexual fantasies that circulate as mass culture wind up protecting, and in some sense, reinscribing a "real" center to the home. Mothers, of course, are who and what I see as occupying this center.

Skipping ahead to chapter 7, she says:

Critically, contemporary laws on obscenity originated during Japan's period of modernization with Article 175 of the Criminal Code in 1907 and Article 21 of the Customs Tariffs Law in 1910.

...arguing that the first obscenity laws were there to protect Japan's image to Western eyes, and to protect Japanese eyes from "the graphic genitalia on western nudes[.]"

A line was drawn around genitalia that was codified by law in 1918, when the courts ruled that in public media the "pubic area need not be hidden but there should be no anatomic details to draw the viewer's attention"

[/edit] Just got a copy of Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Post-War Comics Campaign; the section on comic censorship in Japan doesn't add any detail to the Article 175 stipulation, but with regards to lolicon in particular says:

Controls on manga broke down even further in the late 1980s, as the guidelines disappeared. Schodt felt that comics producers outdid one another in sexual provocativeness, at the same time they entered the mainstream magazines (even those designated for teenagers and younger children) and designed stories with a rorikon ("Lolita complex") flavor. "Instead of adult males doing very adult things to mature women ... the sex objects became increasingly 'cute'--and younger," according to Schodt.

Schodt being the author of Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. One book always leads to another...

A publicized murder of three pre-school girls in 1988-1989 by a "comic book addict" apparently spurred parental groups to action, and publishers started self-censoring.

How do historians determine the historical value of something? With all the discussion of whether or not Confederate monuments should be removed one naturally wonders how you determine if something is truly too valuable as a piece of history to be destroyed

I have a question I'm not sure where to put, but it does qualify as history, so here goes...

When did humans first learn of being immune to disease? I think I read something about the 1500s and rubbing smallpox pus into a surface scratch as a form of vaccinating in China, but I was more specifically wondering if people had caught on to the fact that some folks are just naturally immune to things, how far back they could have possessed such knowledge and what people back then would have made of such an individual (besides maybe being a witch or divine intervention)

Just curious, thanks in advance!

So I recently had cause to go through some of the lists of members of each class at Annapolis. And while West Points 1915 class deserved the title of 'the class the stars fell on' some of the mid 1900s USNA classes give them a run.

The 116 strong class of 1906 included: Frank Jack Fletcher, John Towers, John McCain, Aubrey Fitch, Leigh Noyes, Milo Draemel, and Robert Ghormley.

Ahead of them in 1904 we're both Kimmel and Halsey. While 1905 had Nimitz and John H. Newton. Stark too had just graduated in 1903.

Then below them in 1907 were Spruance, Theobald, and Bellinger. With Kinkaid and Kelly Turner following up in 1908.

Quite who's who of the USN in WW2 that were all still mostly friends 40 years later too.

When the roman republic fought against Hannibal in the second punic war it seemed to raise army after army it seemed like Rome had infinite man power. However if you fast forward to the the battle of Battle of the Catalaunian Plains 451 Romans could barely muster an army and after that victory they couldn't ever muster a force close to that. Why couldn't western Romans muster any armies to fight any of the immigrants? Was it just they didn't have the money?

One last question why did Roman legions switch from a gladius to a longer steel sword? Was the gladius bad technology? it seems like we never really saw it again in history or am I way off on that?