I have a Skype interview on Monday with some faculty from my top university pick for a PhD. I've never had to do an interview to get into a school before and have no idea what to expect. I'm going to be a nervous wreck this whole weekend.

I want to say the mods here are awesome. I asked a question yesterday that garnered a good bit of attention, including some less than adequate answers. I'd get the notification there was a response to the thread, open my phone not five minutes later, see in the one-line preview it was a joke or a one-line answer, and open the app only to see the offending response had already been vaporized. I know modding here must be a tremendous time sink and I appreciate the work all of you do.

Also, if you haven't already, check out the second top-level response, an essay by u/Hergrim [here] (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ujq7p/im_an_english_tradesman_in_1355_whos_handy_with_a/dtm94lm?utm_source=reddit-android) because it's excellent and deserves some love too.

Hi r/AskHistorians ! I'm an illustrator and I finished last weekend a series on ancient history civilizations (mostly) across the Mediterranean.
https://oscarcaselart.tumblr.com/post/170240727543/finally-finished-this-whole-set-and-took-the

I'd be very curious to hear what some people in this community think about them, or if it reminds them of interesting anecdotes or tidbits they'd like to share !
(and even though this was never supposed to be documentary art, I'd be interested to know what I got wrong or kinda right in spirit at least, just for my own education)

Hi, I'm a PhD student currently working on the Tunisian Campaign during the Second World War, and I just wanted to share an interesting tidbit from my work that I encountered today - In preparing for the Tunisian campaign following Operation Torch (November 1942), Allied Air planners made no provision for rearward air basing for the Allied Air Forces; they expected the campaign to be over in 46 days. Despite their optimistic assumption that North Africa was to be in Allied hands by the end of 1942, the campaign was in fact to drag on until May 1943, a matter not helped by the steady breakdown of Allied air power following the Torch landings (and only rectified by February).

I guess I'll plug the recent post I made about the black pirate Diego el Mulatto. I've been thinking about doing a little "series" here where I talk about "Extraordinary Pirates and Buccaneers No One Has Heard of Or At Least Probably Don't Know Much About" and this seems like a good one to start.

Week 15

On February 2^nd , B.D. - a soldier in the 8^th Infantry – wrote to his father [the following excerpts are either taken from sentences or otherwise from censorship office, attached to the Military Court folder]: “That's a bunch of crooks back in Italy; but they'll pay back once the war is over … I have always told you well to keep you up, but I got to a point I need to spit it out … I have been a liar so far, that it was all make believe … they feed us stuff that even beasts don't want to look at it … I am fed up with this war and there is no beginning for peace … once we are done we'll throw ourselves on the ground … but rest assured I won't die for this rotten Italy!”

The Italian Army did not have nearly enough men to look through all the exchanged letters – as it would have been the ambition of the High Command – far from it, only a small sample (estimates fell as low as 2%, with special care though on some “notorious” elements) of the letters from and to the front were opened. This one was though, and yielded its author five years of jail and a significant fine of 500 lire.

Worse luck had those whose infractions were committed openly; such as one M.E. - a soldier in the 1^st Artillery – who argued back at his Lieutenant that “the war was the ruination of Italy and of all the man fighting it, because those who spoke [well of the war] did not know what it was” and later added that “those in Caporetto had done well, because they were tired of the war”. The fact that he had written on a booklet words “hateful towards the Monarchy and exalting of anarchism” and that he had sold a pair of shoes and knickers weighted also against him, so that he was sentenced to twenty years in jail.

The same sentence occurred to a soldier F.U. and a Sergeant D.T.G. that the week before had thrown some bread in the Austrian trenches in exchange for a few cigarettes. The men who had witnessed the event failing to open fire on the Austrians were sentenced to seven years instead.

Military Courts had of course to take into account whether there was a history of unruly behavior; such was the case of a D.C.G – soldier in the 4^th Infantry – who had repeatedly expressed his anti-patriotic sentiments to his comrades, once even praising an officer who had been caught prisoner and expressing his thought that the Austrians were “his brothers” and that, if he had been able to go back to his home, he would have written on the walls “Long live Austria!” and “Down with Italy!”.

Besides these episodes his actual good state of service prompted the court to grant him generic extenuating circumstances, resulting in life imprisonment instead of death.

The courts were to some extent obviously overworked, so that informing the families of their proceedings was neither a priority nor necessarily in agreement with the general policy of keeping the military issues within the military. Thus on the 29^th of January a A.C. - widow of one U.C. who had allegedly left his position with others while the remaining portion of their Brigade held the bridgehead of Pinzano to be eventually surrounded and destroyed – wrote to the Command: “To His Excellence, It has been two months since my husband … has been shot, and until now I knew nothing of it; therefore, if the sentence was deserved, because he had betrayed the Motherland, then I'll accept it and all his superiors have done, that don't act without care or for revenge; but if on the other hand it was a mistake or a false report, then I must beg His Excellence to look into the matter and remember that I am a widow with child and in need, in the truest meaning of the word.”

During WW1 5,200,000 Italians served in the Army. 571,000 of them died, 451,645 were declared invalid, 57,000 died as prisoners of war while some 60,000 were lost somewhere – either dying unaccounted or not returning to their previous domicile.

Through the same years 400,000 cases were sent to court for violations committed while under service terms [this is not including the 470,000 men who did not answer the call to arms – 370,000 being Italian living in foreign countries^1 – who did not serve in the military and therefore did not fall under military jurisdiction, unlike civilians in war zones as we will see]. This gives a total of around 6% for the enlisted men that were subjected to some inquiry by the military justice – 350,000 cases were settled before the amnesty of September 2^nd 1919 (around 210,000 were found guilty and 140,000 not guilty); 50,000 were still open at the time. As historian Alberto Monticone noted, “6% of indicted in an Army is a symptom of a severe internal fracture and leads to believe that either indiscipline and rebellion were widespread or that some sort of divide, of inability to build a mutual understanding had developed between the commands and a portion of the troops”.

It is generally established that the nature of those violations was not political. That they were not – unlike the vehement claims of the interventionist public opinion makers – the result of a conscious defeatist effort, whether from the Socialists, the Catholics or the neutralist fraction of the establishment. That there was no network of saboteurs spreading among the troops, that any influence of the civil society on the troops' morale was minimal, including the most infamous episodes such as the revolt of the Catanzaro Brigade or the “socialist” conspiracy of Pradamano. That the defeat of Caporetto was not the result of a military strike of any sort.

Such a view is supported essentially by any source that looked at the bulk of the army from outside, trying to find ties between the high politics ground and the life of the trench soldier. And it is fair to say that, in writing a history of the War, looking from above, there is little cause to question the non-political nature of these “crimes”. But, if we consider a history of the people at war, our perspective might shift a bit.

It is true that those actions appear driven by a less than conscious political mind, inspired first and foremost by the material conditions of the men – and often the most “extreme” practices such as self-mutilation were the result of deep, genuine ignorance – and of course, fear. But it's easy to forget what the realization of the war reality had been for many of those men. The realization that some force beyond their understanding had taken them from their home, their family, their life and placed them somewhere else. Where others were in charge of their fate, where being ordered to this or that battalion, to this or that portion of the front, where being found unable or able, ill or healthy, was the difference between life and death. A few miles away people were safe, they were safe in the hospitals, they were safe along the supply lines, in the rear, the depots, everywhere else but there; there they might as well be all dead. As men muttered to each other, “war was war, and them who didn't run went down”.

And it wasn't an exaggerated perception: casualty rates in the worst positions around the time of a major offensive could reach 90%, while dropping significantly in other areas.

What realistic political action was left then to those men, other than either defy military justice or die? It's a common trap to disqualify as non political, those actions that are not the result of a political organization, of a political mindset; it's even easier to disregard the simplest actions of men as irrelevant, being ultimately a confuse manifestation of the ignorant sentiments of a thoughtless mass. But political actions need not to be competent, effective, to project any lasting impact impact on society, that we could see from outside. The fact that those men's behavior lacks political connotations for us – or for the political observers overall – does not mean that it had no political connotation for them. And we can't really claim to be able to read into the mind of the man who cursed against the King to establish whether he was a socialist, a pacifist, an anarchist, a man who had forgotten himself for a minute, a violent, a coward, a callous criminal or one who had had one too many drinks.

A task – that of mind reading – that was often the trade of military judges, informants and military police; attempting to sort out the defeatist from the incautious, the fool from the socialist, the naive from the subversive. Police reports, sentences and censored letters are the main sources on these men's state of mind – and they are obviously partial and incomplete.

But the military authorities could not do otherwise, as they had to look at the men with a specific goal in mind: to keep them in line, to ensure a minimum of discipline, to suppress but also somehow prevent those violations that constantly nipped away at the nation's very needed manpower.

And to prevent them was the key point; for – no matter how much of the High Command personal inclinations translated into the harsh and often callous treatment of the soldiers – Cadorna had soon accepted that there was no way to simply motivate, to persuade the soldiers to die in scores, for reasons they could not understand. They could be kept together to some extent – and the most effective way appeared to be the perspective that a great victory was the only way of ending the war – but it had to be a defensive fight on the moral front; a fight as decisive as that with the enemy on the battlefront.

Hi! My question is, how do the topics of interest in popular history differ by region? For example, the AskHistorians community asks and answers a lot of questions about WW2 and Medieval Europe, presumably because the members of the AskHistorians community are largely American and European. Would an AskHistorians-like group in another region of the world focus on similar questions? I presume not. Which historical events and time periods consistently capture the popular imagination in, say, China or India or Nigeria or Russia? Would those historical narratives be compatible with the answers we read here, or do the major narratives in different regions offer competing, incompatible stories of world history?

So, just under a year ago, news broke that a bundle of arrowheads had been discovered during the excavation of an incredibly high status 'Rider's Grave' (Viking age grave including fittings for horse equipment) in Denmark. A few days later, the initial CT-scan showed that not only was this now the second largest single grouping of arrowheads found in a burial at 22-23 heads, but that part of the organic quiver had been preserved by the way the arrowheads corroded.

Now on Tuesday the first results of the conservation were released -- part of the quiver has indeed survived, and appears to be a cylinder made of two pieces of softwood covered in leather. Not only that, but the arrowshafts have been bound in silver wire (the wire isn't visible, so could conceivably also be copper/brass in line with the Hedeby find) and the buckle associated to it was made of copper and silver, making this an imminently fancy bit of gear.

The amazing bit is the quiver though -- we're fairly certain a large number of the multiple-arrowhead finds in graves were originally deposited in quivers, or else tied together, because of how they're found bundled together. However, soil conditions almost always destroy the all-organic quivers, and this is only the second time (yes the second time) the very exact conditions needed to preserve at least some of the organics have happened to coincide with a deposited Western style quiver (the other was Scar in Scotland, and yes I've qualified that with 'Western style' because we do have two or three well preserved Eastern style quivers from Birka and Moscheva Balka and Altdorf and probably other places, not to mention the slightly more numerous finds of metal fittings from Eastern quivers).

It's also only the third find of a Western Viking quiver at all (Hedeby produced parts of at least one probable quiver from the harbour).

And unlike Scar, which only had bare traces of wood on the outside of the arrows, there's more than enough surviving of the woodwork to get a reasonable idea of the construction. Pictures are currently minimal, but I'm holding out hope for a decent amount of the base to be preserved... it's still not going to answer my question of how to strap one of these non-Hedeby style quivers, but it's still more answers than we had!

And the wire wrapping is just as rare -- being again, only the third find ever, with parallels from Hedeby and Birka.

So yeah, this is rare, probably even rarer than rare and is very, very exciting and I can't wait for the full publication.

(Also, if you're wondering what the largest single deposition of arrowheads in a burial is, it was the Ladby ship at 45!)

There's a really specific Byzantine ceremony I've been trying to remember the name of all day. It took place in Hagia Sophia and it involved trying to make it took like candles were floating around the Emperor. It may have been either the Easter or Christmas ceremony? I'm fairly sure it was in the Book of Ceremonies and not Pseudo-Kodinas.

If anybody knows which ceremony I'm thinking of I'd be super appreciative.

I am a recent graduate from Berklee College of Music, and I have finally come to terms with the fact that I don't love music. After almost a year of brainstorming, I think my dream would be to become a history professor at a good college. My interests lie in European history, everywhere from ancient times to early 19th century.

Is this not a smart idea? Will I be able to get into a good grad program in history with a bachelors in music? I have a decent undergrad transcript (I took a a few history electives and graduated with a 3.3 cumulative gpa), but is there anything I should be doing this year to improve my chances of getting into a grad school next year?

Are we allowed to ask for recommendations on books in the short answer thread?

I'm currently reading Julia Lovell's The opium War and am really interested about China during this period, looking for a book that would go into the everyday life of the Chinese people in this region during the 1800's.

I'm looking at grad programs again after seeing a posting for a really cool fellowship got me pondering again. It's nerve-racking but so much less so than when I was still in undergrad looking out at the future with no idea if I could hack it in the working world or in academia. The same people who a couple years ago were sitting me down to tell me it might not be worth it are helping me look at programs and it would be funny if it wasn't so weird. I still don't know if it's going to be for me, but I feel somewhat more confident. My biggest fear as an independent scholar is that I'm too much of a dilettante to make it in a specific program and what I think is a genuine interest in a certain area of history is just a protracted "ooh, shiny!".

Did Templar or Teutonic Order Chaplains wear the White mantles of the Knights or the Black or Grey of the Sergeants?

Were the Chaplains nobles or non nobles?