I have been happily, productively, surprisingly working on my book (on the history of nuclear secrecy in the United States) lately. Very steady progress, and frankly I'm enjoying it more than I ever have before, for whatever reason. Maybe enough time had passed that any residual dissertation fatigue has finally leaked out? Maybe I'm just a better writer than I was before and it's kind of fun to see how this dope of me of the past could have been better with just a little bit of experience? Anyway, it's been fun, and I'd forgotten some of the great little things I had cooked up before.

Here's a little paragraph I enjoyed writing, in my chapter about security issues during the Manhattan Project (which were much more concerned with leaks than spies):

The Manhattan Project security officers cataloged many “typical” examples of leaks or “loose talk” that they investigated. In one such episode, a patent engineer in Chicago decided that his company ought to research the splitting of uranium-235, and his supervisor ended up contacting Arthur Compton at the University of Chicago with this idea. Compton in turn told the Manhattan Project security forces about this potential leak of information, who tracked down the engineer in question. It turned out that he had gotten his idea from a pamphlet published by the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, which had contained a discussion of nuclear fission in the service of arguing that “God has given to Christians the gift of the Holy Spirit with energies far more dynamic than those of exploding atoms.” This was, the agents later related, a “harmless” case, but indicative of the thoroughness of their efforts. They also noted, with some evidence bemusement, that religious pamphlets of this nature, where the power of atomic energy was contrasted with the power of God, constituted a not insignificant source of this wartime “loose talk.”

/u/corruptrevolutionary, let's do a thing.

As it gradually coalesced over the course of the twelfth century, the Cistercian monastic order's principle of "self-reliance" rested on two paradigms: first, that the monks and nuns themselves should be active in manual labor, as part of their service to God; second, that convents should operate as independently of lay help and oversight as possible. In turn, early communities developed a couple of ways to address this. One, which seems to have been adopted from the small, informal communities that helped inspire the Cistercians, was to participate in small-scale pastoralism (herding, livestock) rather than farming. That required less intensive and numerical human participation than agriculture, permitting a higher degree of self-sufficiency and labor participation for those nuns and monks.

The other, more famous option, was directly tied to how Cistercian monasteries especially in the French/Rhineland heartland tended to acquire their land and wealth. This was to develop a two-tiered hierarchy of community members: choir monks/nuns and conversi/conversae, or lay brothers/lay sisters. Unfortunately, there is vastly more research on lay brothers than sisters, so I'm going to concentrate on men's communities for now. But please keep in mind that women's houses also participated in land acquisition and rule, grange consolidation, and evolution of the order's internal practices.

The longstanding myth of Cistercian foundations was that these communities branched out into fresh wilderness, clearing forest for agriculture in France or draining lowlands near the North Sea. Extensive research into both twelfth century Cistercian sources and early medieval environmental/agricultural history has shown that in fact, earlier peasants had long ago made most of that land arable and it was in general being actively farmed. The Cistercian contribution was less in origination than organization. They consolidated tracts of land owned or rented by diverse groups and families, often dedicated to borderline subsistence production, into managed estates or "granges".

So what of the people living on that land? After all, the whole point was that Cistercians would bring their own labor, not rely on tenants.

In some cases, certainly, tracts of land donated to Cistercian houses by wealthy nobles were transferred and operated "intact," simply under new management--there are cases from northern France of abbesses (!) adjudicating disputes and trials among their tenants. This was the norm for monastic practice at the time, and would be preferred by later generations of Cistercians as well. However, in the early years, the attitude towards the spiritual importance of self-reliance interacted with contemporary socio-economic patterns to produce that consolidation of land into granges worked by monks--just, not choir monks alone.

Some of the land that passed into Cistercian control did so because it was newly empty and nonproductive. Population growth, after all, dovetailed with urbanization, and even in the twelfth century rural people were moving to cities for better opportunities. Other times, yes, Cistercian control would uproot the current tenants, since there was no place in the early OCist worldview for outsiders who were not immediate servants.

But agriculture is labor intensive, and there were a lot of people being uprooted, and old monastic habits die hard. From the mid-twelfth century, a distinction emerges between "choir" and "lay" brothers and sisters, although it is very slight at first. Essentially, choir monks spent a higher proportion of their time singing the Divine Office, hence choir; the conversi spent a higher proportion of their time at labor. However, neither activity was exclusive, both sets of people took monastic vows, they were ideally equal members of the community. Since early lay brothers and sisters often included among their number the nobles who had donated the land and believed in the redemptive value of manual labor, it seems reasonable to posit at least some degree of credibility to the claims of "roughly equal in community."

As Cistercian houses grew richer with more land and labor demands ramped up, along with greater social prestige attached to the order, the choir/lay distinction became a division--and an increasingly sharp one. Incoming noblemen and women were prohibited from becoming conversi altogether, reproducing a noble:peasant dichotomy between "those who pray" and "those who work." By the late twelfth centuries, reports from houses like Grandselve show choir monks joining the lay brothers only at harvest time, and lay brothers only returning from grange outposts to the mother house for Mass once a week. By the early thirteenth century, the grange system was formalized, and a monk-nun/lay brother-sister dichotomy firmly established. From this era, too, we have mentions of contracts with outside artisans and servants for things like blacksmith work, too.

The power and socio-economic situation of the Cistercians would continue to evolve over the late Middle Ages, of course. But I think we can safely say that by the thirteenth century, claims to self sufficiency through manual labor could only be true on what looks to us like a technicality. The "real" monks and nuns were cloistered in their convent and choir, chanting the Divine Office and managing their granges as their primary labor.

I hope I've at least touched on all your questions over the past weeks. This is a little out of my comfort zone, so let me know if anything's not clear (or others, please offer corrections if necessary!).

In the course of my current research I came across a Roman sarcophagus found in the vicinity of Worms/Borbetomagus in the early 19th century, which is now lost and possibly preserved at Mainz (possibly - there is no further account of it and it might have been lost in the war, that's something I'll have to find out later), which bears a very interesting inscription (the reference is CIL XIII 6247):

Lupulio Luperco doctori artis / calculaturae Novionia Motuca / mater per Lupulium Lupianum filium f(ecit)

Translated: "For Lupulius Lupercus, teacher of the art of calculation; Novionia Motuca, the mother, had this made through her son Lupulius Lupianus."

This is interesting for several reasons. Calculatura is hapax legomenon, it appears nowhere else. We know of calculatores, literally calculators, persons employed either for teaching or performing calculation in the context of a household, and they appear in Martials epigrams, where they are contrasted (together with the teachers of stenography) with the magister ludi, the simple schoolteacher, as less popular instructors. ("Schoolmaster, be indulgent to your simple scholars; if you would have many a long-haired youth resort to your lectures, and the class seated round your critical table love you. So may no teacher of arithmetic, or of swift writing, be surrounded by a greater ring of pupils.", epigrams X, 62).

Nonetheless, the calculatores seem to have been higher valued than regular teachers (in the price edict of Diocletian, a paedagogus' services are valued at 55 denarii, while a calculator could charge 75), and this higher prestige might come through in the prominent display of Lupulius Lupercus' profession, maybe the pride of a mother as well.

We can see another thing here as well. Since the sarcophagus was commissioned by the mother of the deceased and put up by his brother, we might conclude that the trope that those pursuing careers in the harder sciences do have less success in romantic affairs might indeed be older than dirt and already founded in antiquity (the bookish and inept philosopher is a common trope in ancient jokes).

Also, the family of the deceased seems to have been very fond of wolves, for some reason.

On a related note, I'm looking forward to not looking at stones all day every day once I'm done with collecting my material.

Just read this book by Eric H. Cline.

Title: 1177 B.C: The Year Civilization Collapsed

My understanding of the contents: Egypt defeated the Sea People in 1177 B.C, so civilization did not collapse in that year, though it declined. We're not entirely sure that Sea People existed, and if they did, certainly not where they came from, who comprised them, and what they did. Civilization did collapse, over a couple of generations in the eastern Med, but we're not sure why. There were violent falls ... in some places. Those forts were built by invaders -- or they were built by locals. Cultural mixing is evidence of conquest, say some, or of cultural blending, say others. There was environmental decline ... or not. So maybe it was lots of factors. Dunno.

Feh on the clickbait title. Maybe I shouldn't be so dissatisfied with the contents, since we simply lack the evidence, but the misleading title really put me off.

Waiting at the library for me to pick up: Christopher M. Clark, The Sleepwalkers. At least the start of World War I has sources!

I've been in Nairobi for the last month doing research on the commemoration of the First World War in Kenya. It's been frustrating at times with lots of leads coming upepty sue to destroyed or corrupted files/microfilms. Nonetheless, I've put together my thesis proposal, which I'm pretty confident in. Definitely an arcane topic but I think it has some pretty multi-historiographical implications.

Pretty excited for next week as the CWGC (commonwealth war graves commission) is doing 3D photography of the First World War monuments here and in Dar es Salaam, alongside important cemetery maintenance; it should be a fun experience.

On top of that, I'm finishing up some work on Indigenous canadians as well as amateur war artists in the Great War. All in all a pretty productive month with a month remaining here.

Research was never really something I enjoyed as a historian, as I was much more attuned to historiography and theory (political science background) but this has been a revelation. Disappearing in this third year of PhD studies will certainly be some of my best memories of the process.

I had a question that went unanswered twice - What were the sunflowers cultivated by Native Americans like? How much have cultivated sunflowers changed since? - so I’ve been doing a lot of sunflower-related reading lately.

Part of the reason I had to ask again is that Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden, an account by a Hidatsa woman, describes something in between the large single-headed sunflower of modern agriculture and the branching, small-headed roadside sunflowers:

A stalk springing from seed of one of our cultivated varieties had one, sometimes two, or even three larger heads, heavy and full, bending the top of the stalk with their weight of seed. Some of these big heads had each a seed area as much as eleven inches across; and yielded each an even double handful of seed. We called the seed from these big heads mapi'-i'ti'a from mapi', sunflower, or sunflower seed, and i'ti'a, big.

Besides these larger heads, there were other and smaller heads on the stalk; and wild sunflowers bearing similar small heads grew in many places along the Missouri, and were sure to be found springing up in abandoned gardens. These smaller heads of the cultivated, and the heads of the wild, plants, were never more than five inches across; and these and their seed we called mapi'-na'ka, sunflower's child or baby sunflower.

This despite quite solid-sounding procedures for selecting next year's seed. But that’s just one data point for a crop grown for thousands of years over much of Eastern North America. An ILL got me the thrillingly titled Sunflower Technology and Production, which has a brief essay on the history of sunflower cultivation. Running down some of it’s references gives a clearer picture. It seems that the Hidatsa sunflowers might be an outlier. A quite prolific sunflower researcher, Charles B. Heiser, grew seeds collected from a number of Native American farmers with an eye towards identifying desirable traits for breeding programs. All of his samples grew a single large head except the Arikara sample, which produced both branching and non-branching plants.(Heiser 1951) The Arikara lived quite near the Hidatsa in North Dakota, so close that they eventually joined the Hidatsa at Like-a-fishhook village during Buffalo Bird Woman’s lifetime.

But we don’t just have to go off seeds tested in the 50s. There are plenty of reports from way before that. Seeds were probably brought to Spain in 1510, and started appearing in herbals from 1568. (from Heiser 1955) For fun, also check out this 1590 engraving of a native village with sunflowers growing at the label E (clearer detail). Both make it clear that the domesticated Native American sunflower was the same sort of tall flower with one large head we see across farms on the plains (Helianthus annuus var. macrocarpus), as opposed to the branching form like those roadside Helianthus annuus var. lenticularis.

The surprising part of this story is how long it took Westerners to decide that sunflower seeds were actually useful as human food. Based on the amount of variation seen later, they were clearly imported to Europe multiple times from different sources, but were primarily considered an ornamental for a long time. People record trying the seeds at various times, and some recognizing the potential as an oil crop, and yet nothing really happens on that front until after the plant comes to Russia. As with many Western imports, Peter the Great is given credit for introducing it. Local gardeners probably did the initial work selecting for earlier ripening. Concerted breeding programs began in 1860 to increase oil content for commercial pressing, and Soviet experimental stations did a lot of work on improving yields further. By the late 19th century, Russian varieties were appearing in seed catalogs back in the United States, but it was still considered mostly an animal feed crop outside Russia until WWII. So that’s how we got one of our major oilseed crops.

• Fick, Gerhardt N. and Miller, Jerry F. (1997). “Sunflower breeding,” in Sunflower Technology and Production. Agronomy, 35.
• Fritz, Gayle J. (1990). Multiple pathways to farming in precontact Eastern North America. Journal of World Prehistory 4 (4).
• Heiser, Charles B. (1951). The sunflower among the North American Indians. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 95 (4).
• Heiser, Charles B. (1955). The origin and development of the cultivated sunflower. The American Biology Teacher. 17 (5).
• Putt, Eric D. (1997). “Early History of the Sunflower,” in Sunflower Technology and Production. Agronomy, 35.

Early Modern witchcraft is the name of the game — I decided to try and hunt down some texts specifically on the Salem witch trials, which I haven’t touched since probably high school, trying to get a better handle on something that’s a factor in people’s perceptions of the Early Modern era across the board/Early Modern witchcraft. Here’s hoping I picked some good ones. I also need to be reading Xenophon’s Anabasis for an alumni event but I haven’t even started yet, eek. In the Jesuit department I’m still working my way through Maryks’ book on purity-of-blood laws and the Society’s policies on Jesuits of Jewish descent — which is really (depressingly) interesting in relation to some other research I need to do wading through conspiracy theorist and crank writings on Jesuits and Jewishness, Early Modern and otherwise. (Both the “Jesuits are crypto-Jews” and the “Jesuits engineered the Holocaust” variety — you can’t say they’re not versatile.) So basically... I have nothing to show for this week’s work but a lot I need to be doing.

A question this week on Early Modern vivisection has made me want to revisit primary sources I studied in college — anyone have recommendations for reading on 16th-17th century anatomy studies (both dissection and vivisection) or studies in electricity?

Hello, I've been looking for research materials on topics relating to medieval (Western Europe) warfare. Anything would do really, topics on diplomacy, battles, strategy, logistics, life, etc.

While I appreciate any suggestion, because of where I live (third world, non-English speaking country) a lot of books that you might think of will probably not be available to me, and would have to be imported, at expensive prices. So while I still appreciate book suggestions, any good source that can be found online and/or free would be great too!

thanks in advance!

Edit: thanks so much to all who replied!

I'd really like to read more about slavery (life of slaves, culture, etc) in Brazil and southern American plantations in general. Could you recommend any scientific historical book? Popular history is good enough as long as it deals with facts with no agenda

Can anybody point me towards specific, primary source accounts, of lances being used on foot in medieval battles? Not Agincourt!

Also gonna repeat my request from a couple of weeks ago for anything on men-at-arms in the 16th century?