Coming here for advice. After several years, the National Archives finally sent me the FBI file for a virtually unknown African American man who was convicted in the 1940s for "advocating the overthrow of the US government by force." The file contains his unpublished, 99-page manifesto and his group's by-laws (30 pages). The image quality of the manifesto is poor and you can only read about 75%. The file and the man's life is somewhat interesting, but not interesting enough by themselves to turn this into a biographical book--and I'm no longer working on the topics that would be relevant for publishing it as an academic article (African American - Asian relations; African American history 1928-1945; African Americans in California; African Americans and anti-white/anti-US activities; African American mid-century homeopaths/metaphysicians).

I'm trying to figure out what to do with this. I don't want it to just sit collecting dust. But I also don't want to just randomly upload it somewhere online in case it could be used by someone for a good research project. Any suggestions?

And if anyone is interested in the file/person, please reach out to me.

E:%

Like a lot of people this year, I'm on a deeply casual Kennedy family spiral. If you're interested in serendipitous meetings between famous people of the 20th century, you could do much worse than just tracking people who crossed paths with the Kennedys, but even so I haven't been able to get this anecdote from Claire Bond Potter's "Looking Out of the Frame" out of my head since I read it. Sometimes it's like the planets have mysteriously come into alignment:

In 1958, [Gore] Vidal, a relative of Jackie’s by marriage, took playwright Tennessee Williams to the Kennedy home in Palm Beach, FL. Williams, a handsome gay southerner, had already written seven hit plays. He claimed he had no idea who the Kennedys were, but they wanted to meet Williams, and Vidal produced him. After cocktails, Jackie and JFK proposed some skeet shooting and, legend has it, Williams was a better shot than Jack. As the then-Senator stepped up for his turn, Williams admired his body. “Get that ass!” he said to Vidal. According to author Christopher Bram (2012), Vidal told the playwright “he shouldn’t cruise our next president, then repeated the remark to Kennedy. ‘Now that’s very exciting!” said Kennedy with a grin.”

And now you can't, either!

Unrelated: I finally got around to reading Allan Bérubé's Coming Out Under Fire and I would recommend it to anyone who's interested in LGBT history of the 20th century, the experiences of American servicemen and women during WWII, or both. The book is endlessly interesting and quite gripping -- I must be the last person on the planet to pick it up, but it's definitely worth a look. I've also been enjoying the 20th century country music history podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones.

In the 1930s, adventure pulps set many of their adventures in exotic, distant lands - with writers often inventing details or fictional places, persons, and history; sometimes very sloppily. On the other hand, you sometimes had pulp writers that did their research - as Carl Jacobi did for his tales set in Dutch Borneo and Balochistan. Although he never traveled for from his native Minneapolis, Jacobi sent letters to exotic places on the map, asking for details. As recorded in his biography:

About this time I became interested in the Dutch portion of the island of Borneo. Hugh Cave had been writing stories of the British side of the island and had created the memorable outpost Tsiang House and the fictitious river, the Molo. But the Dutch side of the island had received little attention. I managed to obtain the vague location of a Dutch military garrison where forty men were stationed. It was in the heart of the head-hunting country, in the district then marked on all maps as "unexplored," and very little was known about it.

Mail was not what it is today. My letter to the commanding officer requesting background information went by train to San Francisco, across the Pacific to Singapore where it was transferred to a coastal freighter, and then around to the east coast of Borneo to a port called Tandjong-Selor. From there it went up the Kayan RIver. I had routed the letter to Samarinda and up the Mahakam River, but the Mahakam was no longer navigable. Anyway, the letter went upriver by military transport in soldered tins so the dampness would not get it. When it reached the onderafdeeling (district) of Apo Kayan, the commanding officer was most obliging.

Jacobi had posted the letter on 6 Feb 1934, and the commanding officer's reply was dated 15 Sep 1934; the reply is included as part of the appendix to Jacobi's biography Lost in the Renparthian Hills.

... I apologize to the many people who asked fashion questions recently in line with this week's theme that never got an answer. I've been pretty busy (work was hectic, and after work I've been sewing myself a pair of shorts) and a good number of the questions were outside of the area I'm really comfortable with. But I do have several bookmarked to come back to today or this weekend! (Please note, /u/JJVMT.)

I'm going to Berlin next month (hurray!) and one thing I like to do when I go on holiday is read something (possibly only tangentially) related to its history. I have two candidates for this trip, and I thought I'd throw them out here to see if people here have thoughts/preferences/recommendations between the two. I already own both, so cost isn't a factor, it's simply deciding which one gets bumped to the top of the queue. The books I'm thinking about are:

1. Frederick the Great by Tim Blanning. What better way to get all Berlin than by reading about Prussia's most famous (and gayest) king?
2. The Holy Roman Empire by Peter Wilson. I really liked his history of the Thirty Years War, and my knowledge of the HRE has some pretty big gaps that need filling (basically if it didn't happen between 1000 and 1250 I don't know shit about it).

I’m currently reading Peter Wilson’s “The Holy Roman Empire” and just finished reading on the two emperor problem between the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine/East Roman Empire. But my question is, are there any known reasons that after the fourth crusade, the crusaders didn’t cede the remaining (non-Venetian taken) Byzantine lands to Otto IV instead of founding the “Latin Empire”?

Paging /u/JACKIEMOON34 bc this is related to that answer I still haven't written you about Shiba Ryatoro.

I'm on a sort of unplanned rest from writing and researching, for health reasons, but there's some exciting news for anyone interested in the Bakumatsu/Meiji Restoration. Shiba Ryotaro's novel Ryoma ga Yuku is being translated into English. Volume 1 is available on Amazon digitally.

The reason why this is so important is that Shiba Ryotaro's fiction has created so much of modern Japan's historical consciousness of this period. The great heroes and anti-heroes of the Restoration, in every fictional incarnation, are rooted in Shiba's work. How people understand these heroes, and how they utilize their legacies in the modern political arena, a lot of it goes back to Shiba. Without breaking the 20 year rule, Japanese politicians regularly refer to the legacy of Sakamoto Ryoma, and when they do, they're talking about Shiba's Sakamoto Ryoma. And yet Shiba's novels are mostly untranslated into English. So, this is a big step forward, and the new volume comes with an incredible long academic introduction by historian Henry Smith which sizes up how the novel came to be written, its historical reliability (mixed), its relationship to Princeton historian Marius Jansen’s English research on Sakamoto, and the Ryoma legacy today. This project has spared nothing publishing the novel in proper context.

I'll have more to say about this novel, and Shiba in general at some time in the near future, but as for the novel itself, I've skimmed it so far, but it's very entertaining, funny, and exciting. Lots of swordsplay, some romance, 100% fictional hijinks and secret missions. Vol. 1 covers country bumpkin samurai Sakamoto Ryoma's early life to leaving his rural backcountry home to study swordsplay in Edo (now Tokyo), experiencing the coming of the Black Ships, getting involved in the local terrorist patriot cell back home, and then fleeing his domain as a ronin.

There'll be four volumes in whole by 2020, if they keep to schedule. One really interesting detail is that the whole project's been financed by a Japanese Ryoma fan who's backed the same top-flight academic translation team that's translated other of Shiba's works previously. I think it's a great example of how a lay history fan can move mountains, and I hope his investment is paid off.

So I am taking a Victorian lit class for my PhD and I wanted to pick up a book to get a lay of the land historically. Any recommendations for an over view of Victorian? I searched the booklist, but couldn't find the period in the headings.

Which periods in which places BEFORE the 1900s was arguably the most brutal in terms of both war and day to day life?

In what ways was Sputnik used as propaganda following its launch?