I am reminded once again how grateful I am to study dead people.

I'm watching Handmaid's Tale, of course, and I continue to be absolutely fascinated by the portrayal (or lack thereof) of religion in Gilead. But, like, if I did cultural/media studies or modern literature or something, and analyzed that, the writers and directors would be around to tell me I got it all wrong or that they never meant that. Gahhhhh.

So, as a scholar I am definitely Team Limited Human Lifespan.

BUT DOGS SHOULD LIVE FOREVER DARN IT.

Per a question last week, there was a press conference yesterday afternoon about the Franklin Expedition and the current state of affairs. I'm still on a fine line about what I can say, but [this article](http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/franklin-expedition-hms-erebus-terror-1.4636222) covers a lot more than the previous.

I found out today that Kelly DeVries not only compiled an 1100 page bibliography of works on medieval military history, but that he also provided two book sized updates to it in the next few years after it.

Guess how many copies there are in Australia? Not three, not two, but one. One copy in the whole of the country, and it's in a university academic library that isn't open to the public. New Zealand has two copies. New Zealand. Two Australian libraries have a copy of the first update, and fifteen have copies of the second update (including a high school for some reason), but it's the first I really want.

So. Damn. Frustrating.

This would ideally have been a discussion attached to this thread but I'm not sure if the usual site format would allow.

Based on the sample of people on Reddit (which admittedly may not be a representative sample of young historians and grad students) it seems that in some areas (feminist history, slavery, the holocaust) emotional detachment is not as much of a prerequisite of discussing and writing about history as when I last studied it formally. (Although in some other respects, often older history, there's an anthropology-influenced opposition to bringing contemporary values to the table.) Some of the detachment to which I was/am accustomed may also be related to British culture, and the age of school teachers and university tutors (born 1920s-1950s). It's not as if their opinions were permanently ossified at that point: one of those who is still working has commented in public on racism in coverage of their topic, which is not something I can imagine being said in the department as it was 20 years ago, except by the one lecturer who liked to present themselves as a rebel.

Given the association of feminism and antiracism among students and Millenials with concepts of trauma and "self-care", and that statistically graduate students are predominantly liberal in the US sense, I wondered if history students and younger historians now actively discussed aspects of their work that they found disturbing, and the idea that people might sometimes be drawn to difficult topics because of their personal history, and then feel burnt out by those? Of course, not everyone needs that, and some people can do the cognitive empathy without feeling overloaded by affective empathy.

Having experienced both being inured and desensitised to certain topics in a way I thought many people would consider unacceptably cold, and found others disturbing (i.e. mild related bodily sensations and occasional intrusive thoughts for days after reading about them) no matter how often I've read about them, I feel I see both sides of where people may be coming from on this.

I noticed when looking up topics related to that question that there has been some publication about vicarious trauma in oral history interviewing of witnesses. But as regards other historical study there were merely mentions of its being under-researched.

Which isn't really that surprising - it's a topic that never would have occurred to me explicitly before later study in psychology and counselling fields. (I noticed via that, that there were informal avenues for support built in in the field I'd been working in, what I think Americans call human services.)

With history there used to be generally - and still seems to be around certain topics - a pressure to keep it all in, whilst literature studies, for example, whilst also only reading about stuff, seem to engage with this sort of thing rather more.

These days, the pressure of having members of the public use [bad] history for political ends is one stressor that does seem to get talked about a lot more, given the way the internet propagates that.

I'm currently reading a biography of noted military theorist Carl von Clausewitz and it's focused primarily on his time serving in the Napoleonic Wars. The Napoleonic Wars are a subject that I've by and large struggled to find interesting despite my strong MilHist background, but the author of the biography (U.S. Naval War College Professor Donald Stoker) is doing an admirable job of making a subject I don't particularly like quite interesting.

That's my lengthy prologue to my question: what is a history book you read that made you enjoy a subject/topic/period that you by and large struggle to care about?

For me the big one is still Peter Ackroyd's The Tudors, the first thing I read that made me actually interested in post-Henry VII Tudor England. I have not since re-visited the period beyond the limits of necessity.

Kind of a strange question, and perhaps a little off topic, but here we go.

Do you think, as a historian, that you or one of the following generations of historians might become obsolete and replaced by machines one day?

EDIT: by one day I mean in the near future, or within the next hundred years

TL;DR: How do we have a legitimate news organization/website named "The Young Turks" when they were a pretty bad regime, to say the least.

• They were on the usually perceived as "bad" side of WW1, fighting with the Central Powers:

• Wikipedia Link: Central Powers.

• They are attributed to several other genocides that are far less "disputed" than the Armenian Genocide:

  • Wikipedia Link: Assyrian Genocide

• Wikipedia Link: Greek Genocide

• From what I can tell the Turkish government admits that some serious blood was shed during the whole ordeal:

• Wikipedia Link: Official Turkish Government Position.

Is this just WW1 illiteracy? Purely for shock value? Isn't naming your news channel and website "The Young Turks" on the same level as "The Nazi Party" or "ISIS?"

I'm asking in this thread because ultimately my question is: "how is this ok?", or "how is this normalized?" Which I understand is hard to answer, but this is the free-for-all post, so I hope someone can share some insight, or maybe it was an interesting read. Thanks!

I'm not sure whether this question goes into Short Answers to Simple Questions, Sunday Digest | Interesting & Overlooked Posts (for the post that sparked it, still unanswered), here, or nowhere. Please tell me if I've picked the wrong place, and the place I should stick this instead.

A post mentioned someone's assertion that "the Nazis were running a very efficient and economical successful regime".

I tried to find previous answers pertaining to this. My search parameters were badly chosen, or there were too many hits to find what I wanted. Would anyone like to FAQ Finder this, so I can save the links for future use?

Memory suggests that the usual objections are

• The Nazis were late to going to a full war economy (1942?)
• Tooze, The Wages of Destruction
• Nazi factional infighting promoted by Hitler
• Production inefficiency, like Germany producing 47 gazillion types of tanks but the Russians producing 5. Also inefficiency due to having to use captured Czech and French equipment.

The only posting I did find was "Where did the myth that Nazi Germany was so effecient, politically and bureaucratically, stem from?" at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5gsien/where_did_the_myth_that_nazi_germany_was_so/ . But the only substantive answers there, so far as I see, deal only with state finances, traditional German efficiency, and a suggestion by /u/DoctorDanDrangus that a state that carried on with war in the shambles of 1944 and 1945 shows at least one kind of efficiency.

Hardly history related, but I'm about to watch the first episode of the new Westworld season. When season 1 ended I said "That's it, it's perfect, it's over. Leave it alone." I'm prepared to be disappointed the way I was with True Detective, but I'll keep an open mind.

Update: Season Two doesn't look like anything to me.

I really enjoyed the pop-history book "Shadow Divers" by Robert Kurson, but I'm looking for books that take a slightly more rigorous, academic approach to similar issues of discovering unknown or long-lost mysteries. Any recommendations?

Specifically, I like that this book told a narrative about the research process that went into discovering the identity of the mystery U-boat, instead of just presenting the final results. I just wish there would have been a more in-depth treatment of the content and not such a pop gloss to it.

What was the longest continuously active war in history between 2 or more states?

By continuously active i mean that did not have a periods greater than a month in which state or state-like entities did not engage in military action. So for example the hundred years war would generally not qualify since there were multiple periods where the conflict was "frozen". Likewise wars that are primarily fought through/by non-state-like entities (like guerrillas, or non-organized combatants) would not qualify.

In short i'm wondering what the longest "traditional" war (such as the first world war) was, how long it lasted, and what were the reasons why it lasted so long.