I just started in my dream job! I'll be taking care of external communication for the Art and History Museum in Brussel, Belgium. First time i'll be able to put my history degree to good use after more than ten years in non-history jobs!

Already made a reddit account (/u/ArtHistoryBrussels) and i'm planning to share the enormous wealth of artefacts, art and stories the museum has to offer on Reddit (and other social media). If you ever happen to be in Brussels, pay us a visit, you won't be disappointed!

I've been doing some reading about gay and lesbian subculture fashion (as you do) and I read the most wonderful article on the history of lesbian dress in the Netherlands -- Judith Schuyf's "'Trousers with Flies!!' The Clothing And Subculture Of Lesbians". In addition to some wonderful pictures of genteel women in suits, ties, and monocles, it has a really interesting look at adaptations to laws prohibiting crossdressing:

The wearing of clothes of the other sex was often regarded as a threat to the social order. Wearing men's trousers was forbidden in local by-laws in the Netherlands in some cases as late as the 1980s. The police used to harass lesbians wearing trousers in the neighbourhood of gay bars; they could be arrested and fined or - in the case of minors - had to be collected by their fathers. In the United States you had to wear 'three pieces of women's clothing' but in the Netherlands it was the cut of the clothes that mattered. Trousers were defined as masculine if they had flies. Women wanting to wear men's trousers therefore had to sew up the flies and put in a side-zip. Acquiring the specific type of clothing one wanted was also not an easy matter. A woman who walked into a shop and asked for men's clothing ran the risk of being expelled and not every lesbian was handy with needle and thread.

Or on an individual level:

Door (born 1946) went to study in Amsterdam when she was 17 years old. Almost the first thing she did was buy a second wardrobe of trousers and shirts. She wore her old clothes only on visiting her parents during weekends. ~or her mother her clothes had always been an important object in the process of trying to make her daughter more feminine (her mother and the saleslady in combination trying to get her to buy nice dresses and skirts) and therefore the politics of clothing was the pivotal point in the process of final coming-out. On hearing from her brother, who had acted as an intermediary, that her daughter was a lesbian, her mother immediately went to Amsterdam to confront her daughter, who for the first time had not changed her clothes. She was wearing men's trousers. On seeing her her mother exclaimed 'Trousers with FLIES!' as if epitomizing all misery.

The article incorporates a cartoon that ran in lesbian newspaper Vriendschap showing two short-haired women identically dressed in suit jackets, neckties, sensible shoes, knee-length skirts, and mannish berets -- except one of them has a fabulous feather stuck in her cap, and her friend is telling her "you're always so effeminate!". After reading a couple somewhat snotty articles about lesbian fashion in the US and UK during the 1990s, this whole piece was rather refreshing.

On another note, another book I was reading on the Renaissance Italian home casually dropped in that musical instruments were common gifts for courtesans to receive from their patrons and were the most common gift for men charged with sodomy to have given to their younger partners. I think I need to look into this one -- I almost made a post asking "why musical instruments?" re. the latter case but it seemed doomed to speculation. God knows I'm speculating.

Talk about dumb luck! Read recently about an account of a quite murderous duel where the principals insisted on a mere three paces distance - more a suicide pact than a duel. Both survived essentially unharmed when the bullets from both shattered each other's pistols rather than striking flesh.

I just submitted the final draft of my MA thesis. I have complicated feelings about it.

I am currently reading Leonardo da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson, where he quotes the following passage written by Leonardo himself:

"The penis sometimes displays an intellect of its own. When a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and goes its own way, sometimes moving on its own without the permission of its owner. Whether he is awake or sleeping, it does what it desires. Often when the man wishes to use it, it desires otherwise, and often it wishes to be used and the man forbids it. Therefore it appears that this creature possesses a life and an intelligence separate from the man."

This apparently is written in one of Leonardo's manuscripts at Windsor Castle.

I’m not going to vote. I won’t vote for a Catholic and I won’t vote for a damned Republican. Maybe I’ve said that before. My ancestors were all Catholic and not very far back. And I have reason to hate the church.

• Robert E. Howard to Harold Preece, 20 Oct 1928, CL1.237

The presidential election of 1928 was a contest between Democratic candidate Al Smith of New York and Republican candidate Herbert Hoover of Iowa. Smith was Catholic at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States was prominent, and a wet dedicated to the end of Prohibition. The Republicans still faced resentment in the South as the party of Reconstruction. The election was contentious, but while Smith successfully carried cities he lost many rural districts, and Hoover won the presidency. Four years later, Howard would repeat his anti-Republican sentiments when he declared to H. P. Lovecraft: "I’d cut my throat before I’d vote for Hoover." (CL2.392)

Howard's reasons behind the sentiments he expressed toward the Roman Catholic Church are vague, although I suspect something of his readings in history colored his views, as the Church's part in the conversion of the "pagan Europe" might have rankled, and its depictions were not always positive in secular histories. In another letter he wrote:

Look at history: the pagans in Rome oppressed the early Christians. The Christians got control and began to maltreat the weaker sects. The Catholics in England oppressed the Church of England, then they got the upper hand and oppressed Catholics, Presbyterians and Puritans, who fled to America and oppressed the Quakers who would have oppressed anybody who might have been weaker than they.

• Robert E. Howard to Harold Preece, 4 Jan 1930, CL2.3-4

Week 16

There's worse places to spend your winter than Versailles, whether it's a permanent exile or a brief interlude that allows you to escape the pains of Italian politics.

In the early days of February a few men met there, that had grown apart from each other during the war. It made for interesting days and unhappy dinner parties – the kind you see in movies. Luigi Cadorna, sent there as a convenient excuse to remove him from his position as Italian Army Chief of Staff, sitting perhaps a bit dour, his mind busy with his exoneration memoir. Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, a jurist from a family of lawyers, now on the chair of Prime Minister overseeing the demolition of the institutions of public right under the more pressing demands of the war. Vittorio Alfieri – carrying the name of the great Piedmontese tragediographer – whose impressive career would have made any man jolly, weren't he the Ministry of War of a nation fighting the largest war ever fought. And Sidney Sonnino, the stubborn and enigmatic Foreign Ministry, sitting among the others – perhaps in a pensive mood - until he broke silence: I have read that this world war comes from the passage of the last comet close to earth. The comet has poisoned the earth. A few times I have considered this explanation. There must be something in the world that overpowers our will these years. We have all gone mad. Madness alone, unrestrained, is the mistress of men. Then so, how can we claim to control our fate?

I suppose silence resumed soon after.^1

Sidney Sonnino had certainly been tested by the war events, being in charge of the Italian foreign policy since 1914; in the meantime he had also lost one of his close collaborators and old friend – Leopoldo Franchetti – who in the aftermath of Caporetto had committed suicide, hit by both personal and public misfortune.

Awaiting springtime, operations were static on the Italian front. The Parliament remained closed until the following week – with hopes perhaps of some news from the ongoing Caporetto inquest. Other major events were on the move; which means that next weeks will be busy.

But, as next week begins tomorrow, I have been searching for data on suicides on the front line; without much luck indeed. The Army gives [not during war times of course – data were made available well after the War] statistics for causes of death, but not specific for locations. What I could find are two studies: an old review by statistician Mario Bachi [La micidialità dei tentativi di suicidio, in Il giornale degli economisti, 1924] on the effectiveness of suicide attempts and a more recent one by psychologist Enrico Pozzi [Il suicidio militare, in La critica sociologica, 1971] on the causes of suicides among military personnel, that provide some data on the chosen period of time.

According to Pozzi, military suicides dropped significantly during war time, reaching the lower level of civilian suicides. Per 100,000 numbers are given as follows:

From which it appears that war did not increase – rather decrease (in fact for both categories separately and as an aggregate) – the suicide rate, that remained significantly higher for career military men, increasing up to mid rank (52.4 and 42.6 for career officers in the two decades after the war). Possibly an effect of the large number of men called to arms that were “civilians” as of their formation and upbringing. This also agrees with the fact that suicide rates – roughly double for northern regions among civilians – converged over the same values for military men (with the notable exception, perhaps an outlier, of Sardinia, for which suicide rates rose four times well above average).

There is perhaps also to take into account the fact that a suicidal man on the front line might have had an easier way out, than shooting himself, but the suicide rates remained substantially lower after the war than they had been before, with a progressive reduction of the pre war difference between military and civilian.

It is at least not surprising that, while men overall favored poison and edged weapons, military men chose overwhelmingly fire arms (72% - only factory owners topping them with 76.9%), likely due to availability and education.

1 – The Versailles anecdote comes from P. Melograni's Storia politica della Grande Guerra.

There was a flap in the U.S. press in early 1945 concerning the supposed inferiority of U.S. tanks to their German opponents, based on in-the-field correspondence with U.S. tankers. The issue was first publicized by New York Times reporter Hanson W. Baldwin in a series of three articles in January 1945, and the hubbub lasted until about the end of March 1945. It got the attention of Eisenhower and Patton, the former asking 2nd and 3rd Armored Division commanders Isaac D. White and Maurice Rose to prepare unofficial reports polling their troops about how they felt about their equipment, and the latter making a public statement. I found some presumably nationally-distributed articles that were reprinted in my local newspaper. U.S. troops may have not felt very confident about their equipment, but its performance, when using objective facts and not opinions, was better than they could have known.

The "scandal" served to ding the reputation of the Sherman in the post-war period, and it got no better with the publication of Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in WWII in 1998 and the resulting History Channel media. People have begun to wise up, however, due to more recent historiography, and the 2016 For Want of A Gun: The Sherman Tank Scandal of WWII was rightly more poorly received.

I also found this old Buick advertisement while looking.

This reproduction tanker jacket (probably the highest-quality and most authentic one you can get) has been serving me well in this Nebraska winter we're having.

Copy and pasting this from over in r/AskAcademia because, well, the response wasn't great:

Hi all,

I'm a cash-strapped history Ph.D. student looking to make the most out of some day trips to the archives. I plan to scan documents like a madman and go back and review them at a later time -- this has worked well for me in the past. Unfortunately, my PDF scanning app (iOS, iPhone 7), Genius Scan likes to crap out and crash whenever I try to scan a longer document (12+) pages into a single PDF file.

Does anyone know of a better app to do this? I have my iPhone, and I also have an iPad that I'd love to get in the game. I'm also interested in file storage solutions too -- I use Zotero to organize my secondary literature, and it would be pretty sweet if I could get these documents to magically appear in my Zotero library as I was scanning them.

Thanks for any advice y'all can give!

(1/4)

So last Friday I posted about the black pirate captain Diego el Mulatto and for this this week's installment of "Interesting and Extraordinary Pirates and Buccaneers You've Never Heard of Or At Least Probably Don't Know Much About" I thought I'd choose a 17th century Native American pirate who ended up being accidentally marooned on an island for three years and probably was the inspiration for the character of Friday (funny day to post this) in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

Part 1: Background

Beginning around the 1630s and earlier, French, English and Dutch interlopers began settling in the Spanish controlled Caribbean by taking over various small islands which they would then use as a base to attack the Spanish. These were called buccaneers and they often skirted the line between legal privateering and outright piracy even when there was no war between their respective nations. Since the buccaneers were often desperately outnumbered against the might of Spain, they sometimes made alliances with local peoples who were also enemies of the Spanish. Even as far back as the 1570s, Francis Drake banded together with Native Americans and escaped African slaves called Maroons (however, this certainly shouldn't be romanticized either; it was an alliance of expediency and just as often these same buccaneers and privateers and pirates would enslave and kill them as ruthlessly as the Spanish).

In 1631, the English captured and established a base on Providence Island about a 150 miles off the coast of Nicaragua and Honduras. It was probably around this time that they made contact and developed friendly relations with the Miskito peoples and other Indians along the coasts of Central America. English influence here in cooperation with the Miskito eventually became so strong that Britain concluded a formal treaty with the Miskito in 1740 and successfully sent British troops to defend it from Spanish attack in the late 18th and early 19th century. The Miskito monarchs were also formally recognized by Britain and the last one to hold power died in exile in British Jamaica in 1908; other Miskito kings supposedly traveled to England in the 17th century for an audience with Oliver Cromwell and Charles II. Today the country of Belize is what remains of part of this territory and the Belizean and Miskito creole languages spoken along much of the Caribbean coasts of Central America are also based on English, but I'm getting pretty sidetracked here.

Anyway, back in the 17th century, the Miskito were very valued by the buccaneers for their hunting and fishing skills and they had a longstanding custom of bringing a few young Miskito men along with them on their voyages to sail with them for several years before returning home. In return, the Miskito learned English and were given muskets which they became very good shots with. Writing in 1678, the former French buccaneer Alexander Exquemelin wrote in his book The Buccaneers of America:

The Indians often go to sea with the rovers, and may spend three or four years away without visiting their homeland, so among them are men who speak very good English and French -- just as there are many buccaneers who speak the Indian language very well. These Indians are a great asset to the rovers, as they are very good harpoonists, extremely skillful in spearing turtles, manatees and fish. In fact, an Indian is capable of keeping a whole ship's company of 100 men supplied with food, when he is in a place where there's something to catch. (Exquemelin, 220)

In his journal entry for April 1681 in his book A New Voyage Round the World published in 1697, the English buccaneer William Dampier describes a typical company of buccaneers which included a few Miskito Indians:

We were in Number 44 white Men who bore Arms, a Spanish Indian, who bore Arms also; and two Moskito Indians, who always bear Arms amongst the Privateers, and are much valued by them for striking Fish, and Turtle or Tortoise, and Manatee or Sea-Cow; and five Slaves taken in the South-Seas, who fell to our share.

The particular Miskito Indian I'm going to discuss was given the name William or Will, which wasn't his native name, but the buccaneers always gave them a European name when they joined their crews. William Dampier writes:

He was named Will, as the other was Robin. These were names given them by the English, for they had no Names among themselves; and they take it as a great favour to be named by any of us; and will complain for want of it, if we do not appoint them some name when they are with us: saying of themselves they are poor Men, and have no Name.

All that can really be said about Will's early life is that he was a young man probably born in about 1660.

By the 1670s, English and French buccaneers in the Caribbean were being increasingly cracked down on by their own governments that had formerly supported them. In 1679, several buccaneer crews banded together and decided on a very ambitious scheme to cross ~20 miles over the Isthmus of Panama on foot to the Pacific coast where they could then steal boats and raid the hopefully unprepared Spanish Pacific coasts of Central and South America.

God, does anyone know why by Carthage by Serge Lancel is so hard to get a hold of or where I can do so? It's either not sold or else £40 on most online bookstores. Not even my uni library has a copy

Anyone have any recommendations towards documentaries or the like about the Mongol Empire or specifically their military?