Today:
You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.
As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.
Ahoy! I'm Dr Richard Blakemore (@historywomble on twitter) from the University of Reading's History Department and I'm excited to join you on the 18th of September for an AMA about my areas of expertise - the Stuart and Tudor navies, sailors in the Early Modern period, and the module I teach called "Pirates of the Caribbean: Empire, Slavery and Society, 1550-1750"
I recently acted as a consultant for a new gallery at the National Maritime Museum, opening 20 September, on Tudor and Stuart seafarers, and I also wrote a chapter on 'life at sea' for the gallery book. It's also International Talk Like a Pirate Day on Wednesday 19th.
AMA on Tuesday 18 September!
In history classes we used to have thunderous debates, for while “Abbie” was the daughter of a Union veteran, the Munroe boys & I were Confederate sympathizers. How we used to annoy her with our “compositions”—all flaming with love & glorification of the South! I subjoin for some verses which I once placed upon her desk. I have the original copy, for I composed them on the back of a half-tone illustration in Montgomery’s “American History”—a book still on my shelves.
Lovecraft was recounting events when he briefly attended the Slater Avenue School in Providence, RI for the 1898-1899 school year. The poem “C.S.A.: 1861-1865: To the Starry Cross of the SOUTH” and the book was David Henry Montgomery’s The Beginner’s American History (1892).
If it seems odd that a Yankee like H. P. Lovecraft, born and raised in Providence, RI, should have such sympathy with the Southern confederacy...it's complicated, but the views were definitely not unusual. The United Daughters of the Confederacy and other groups of Southern sympathizers embarked in a spate of monument-building and textbook revisionism during the late-19th/early-20th century, trying to banish negative portrayals of slavery and the South and inculcate children in the Lost Cause mythology; on a more academic level William Archibald Dunning and his students would attack Reconstruction (aside: u/freedmanspatrol has a great answer on how to interpret Reconstruction ), and Thomas Dixon Jr.'s novel The Clansman (1905) would become a very successful book, play, and then filmed as The Birth of a Nation (1915) - in which form it led directly to the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan.
I've been focused on Montgomery's book in particular lately, because of how exemplary it is in some respects of the kid gloves approach to slavery and the Civil War. While it probably didn't foster Lovecraft's appreciation for the Confederacy, it definitely would not have challenged any of his prejudices and preconceptions.
Is there some place where people trade easy access to archives? I end up the UK National Archives a couple times a month, and need a few things in Paris and College Park, MD.
question for all you more experienced researchers out there- I'm just diving into my dissertation research, and I'm struggling to, I guess, triage? I end up feeling compelled to read through every single folder in a series, or to read every single issue of a particular run of a journal/magazine, or to go through a newspaper for every single year of my project's timeframe— which gets really, really exhausting, and I've only been at this a few weeks! And at a certain point I suspect it also becomes redundant, like, after I went through five files of full of applications to join the colonial service, the sixth didn't tell me anything radically different, nor the seventh.
But I just can't shake the feeling that there might be something vitally and crucially important in the one folder I decided to skip over and I have got to check it out. Is this something other people have experienced?
Focus Features picks up Harriet starring Cynthia Erivo as Harriet Tubman for Kasi Lemmons
Adjusting for how good the technology of the time was, what were the best and worst times/places to live in throughout history?
Hi guys, I have an assignment to write a paper on some aspect on the Russian civil war. I'd like to research something interesting but overlooked, preferably involving the White Army or any of the other losing factions. If anyone has any recommendations for a person, event, or organization with some neat history behind it, let me know!