I've been nominated for three of this year's Robert E. Howard Foundation awards - all the little articles I published in 2017 got noticed. It's not exactly academic, but I'm still a little chuffed. Probably my most fun one is the Robert E. Howard Bar Guide, which you can read for free.

Finishing the last of the editing on my capstone paper, I'm super excited - it's the longest paper I've ever written (so far) and it's about a topic I'm really passionate about (Allied submarines in WWI).

And then I have to finish my paper on my town's local congregational church, at least it's history from 1716-1786 when it was just the second society of a now neighboring town.

I presented my paper on labor organization for the Teuchitlan culture yesterday at the annual Society for American Archaeology conference. Unfortunately, the room was largely empty due to a half hour delay time because of technical issues with the projector and cables. C'est la vie.

This is more of a curio than a question, as the question aspect would be very difficult to answer unless someone was in the right location or had an exceptionally good memory.

A post on r/history earlier this week led me down a rabbithole of looking at photographs of subjects with the earliest-known birthdates. The one which most surprised me is one of the earliest for Britain because of the startling experience of apparently seeing a photograph (daguerrotype) of someone wearing a periwig as a matter of course (and not in a legal or dramatic role). Seeing photos of people in Victorian clothing is quite normal - whereas this had a strange ghostly feeling of time-travel to it. During the C19th Regency wearing periwigs was already notably old-fashioned, and bishops were no longer required to wear them after 1830.

Martin Routh (1755-1854) President of Magdalen College, Oxford, daguerrotype taken on the occasion of his 99th birthday.
Posters here will probably like this advice attributed to him: “You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir!”
A number of painted portraits also show the wig.

I wondered whether ageing Oxbridge dons were one of the last bastions of wig-wearing or whether Routh stood out even among this group. But to ascertain that would probably require abstruse knowledge from multiple college art collections and/or papers.

Various websites state that an Archbishop Howley (d.1848) was the last English bishop in the habit of wearing a wig, but there appear to be no portraits online of him in old age.
This from a webpage of the college archives suggests that Routh might have been particularly stuck in his ways in certain other respects (although he did preside over new building work):

Routh took no interest in any kind of reform, academic, institutional or otherwise, and Magdalen acquired a reputation as a backwater, to the point that the report of the Royal Commission into Oxford, published in 1852, dismissed it as being ‘among the least important’ academic institutions in the University. Routh also remained stoutly loyal to traditional interpretations of the College statutes, as handed down to him, which could lead to abuses.

Any good books on African mythology? Would love to learn about their Gods.

So I've been thinking about this counterfactual. I've been wondering for a while how large of a role the failure of the Reconstruction Era has had in shaping the contours of American politics in the last 100 years. The connection between Reconstruction, Jim Crow and modern politics largely goes without saying, at least from my perspective. So, if Lincoln hadn't been assassinated (I can hear you internally groaning), what would have Reconstruction looked like? There is currently a thread at the top of this subreddit about the scars of slavery, and it has a good answer comparing how America has dealt with its trauma vs. Germany and the Holocaust. It makes me think about the fact that Reconstruction could (not that it seems likely) have actually been carried out successfully, or at least more successfully than it was. I guess what I am trying to say is that given America's eventual global hegemony, I think Reconstruction has had a very large impact on international politics. And I see Lincoln's assassination as the point at which the success of Reconstruction was prevented.

I don't want to go too far into the counterfactual and try to predict how the world would be different today (although I do think that it would be very, very different), but I really do wonder: is Lincoln's death the fulcrum? It seems to me the clearest point in American history (that I know of at least), where things had the potential to go very differently. Certainly there are other moments like that one, but none that could have had such a profound impact. I imagine that historians have dealt with this topic in the past, and if anyone knows some historical works that deal with this subject of what Reconstruction would have looked like under Lincoln, or whether it was even possible for it to succeed, I would be very curious. Thoughts on my analysis?

In one of the episodes of Band of Brothers, the soldiers are really excited about the news that “‘Oklahoma’ is still playing on Broadway” and even sing some of it. Was the 1943 production play that popular so that even soldiers who were in Army since at least 1942 would know some lyrics from it?