In history-related gossip, it seems as though everybody's favourite imperialist historian has gotten into a bit of hot water, eh?

TLDR: Stanford's (specifically the Hoover Institute's) Niall Ferguson has been caught getting his research assistant to help sabotage a student committee by digging up dirt on a left-leaning student. All in the service of free speech, of course.

This week I was introduced to the 16th century black silk-weaver John Reasonable, his wife, and his five children. (Their surname is sometimes spelled Resonable, Resonabell, Reson, etc. in classic Elizabethan "who gives a damn" fashion.) The Reasonables lived in Boroughside, half a mile from the Rose Theatre, and Imtiaz Habib makes an interesting case that John and the Reasonable family may have had professional and personal ties to Bankside's theater scene. I've been trying to dig in deeper on the "creatives" side of the Early Modern theater -- all the unseen, sometimes unlawful commerce that went into the procuring of costumes and properties for the stage -- and the phantom presence of black men and women like Reasonable in the commercial life of Early Modern playhouses is a really interesting factor I hadn't really accounted for in my earlier answers about race and Early Modern drama. Two of John's children, Jane and Edmund, died within two days of each other in October 1592 in the same plague outbreak that extended the closing of all playhouses. You can read about the family in "The Resonables of Boroughside, Southwark: an Elizabethan black family near the Rose Theatre" or in Habib's book Black Lives In The English Archives, 1500-1677.

I also found that some terrific scholar out there is publishing theater impresario Philip Henslowe's diary online day by day, reporting on each day's happenings (what plays were on, what was happening at the time, etc.) with useful notes. My hat is off to the blogrunner David Nichol, I have a lot of backreading to do! Get thee to Henslowe's Diary ... as a Blog!. The site makes use of the Lost Plays Database ed. Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis, and Matthew Steggle, also a fabulous resource with an impressively meaty roundup on the anonymous "Ur-Hamlet" predating Shakespeare's play of that name which I talked about in one of my answers from this week.

So I got my wisdom teeth out today

For my Bachelor's thesis I have been researching the Moroccan independence movement under the French protectorate, and reading primary sources (specifically the 134 page reform plan by the Comité d'Action Marocaine) has been really interesting to me. I feel like we take resistance against colonialism to be a given in 21st century post-colonial literature, but this reform plan chides the French for not fulfilling the promises of their protectorate and proscribes a list of reforms to actualise the mutually beneficial system of protectorate that was promised to them, rather than fighting for independence.

It's an interesting look into the minds of these prominent Moroccans in 1934, especially since they would release a single page manifesto demanding independence only nine years later.

If you read French, I would really encourage you to check both documents out:

http://mohamedhassanouazzani.org/plan-de-reformes-marocaines/

http://mjp.univ-perp.fr/constit/ma1944.htm

Also, I will shamelessly plug an answer I gave in a week-old thread, based on these sources. (If this is not allowed, I'll remove it!)

[...] no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens wrote several eerie narratives; Browning, the hideous poem “Childe Roland”; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. Marion Crawford, “The Upper Berth” and a number of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, “The Yellow Wall Paper” [...] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in “The Yellow Wall Paper”, rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined.

• H. P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

The "impulse" which drove Charlotte Perkins Gilman to write her seminal classic "The Yellow Wall Paper" (1892) [PDF] was by her own account driven by a personal experience; an intelligent, creative woman, the psychological "rest cures" of the day which sought to stifle her intellect and writing nearly drove her mad. Gilman would later describe this experience in a short essay "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wall Paper" (1913) - because while the story itself is a classic, sometimes the story behind the story can lend great insight as well.

I read this week the fascinating history of human occupation of the Bonin island, currently owned by Japan. It involves a multiethnic, including Europeans, colony without masters until Japan pulled out a fake story about a fictional explorer to claim ownership. Later history is not kind toward the descendants of these islanders.

What will future historians learn about the 2010's if the internet and everything on it is gone by then?

Anyone wonder what's with the trope in literature/film or culture in general or whatever, where deities of ancient Mediterranean and near Eastern societies are "evil"? The only real example I can think of is Pazuzu in The Exorcist rn, but I swear Ba'al gets a bad rap, and Moloch

When Ted Bundy represented himself, why was he not restrained? I asked this earlier in the week and I guess it's more of a legal question but don't really know the right spot to ask. In more modern cases people were in restraints while still representing themselves - so I was curious when it changed. I was watching a Ted Bundy documentary and was astounded by the court footage. Google didn't give much of an answer, most of the Ted Bundy content is spammy.

I've been gathering together a list of all the history podcasts I can find and I've been wanting to share it. Is there a chance that we might add some to the recommendation page? People ask it enough that I think it's worthwhile to direct them towards the good ones. There are some which are lecture series as well as just generally well-sourced, well told stuff like Mike Duncan's work.

Just read (and enjoyed) Sarah Vowell's book Unfamiliar Fishes. Anybody else read this one yet? What did you think?

What was the effect of British colonisation in Myanmar?