Just popping in to post a wave, as I've gotten some PMs and such! I've been gone (so so long) from this place because I got hit with a double whammy of 1) new tenure track position and 2) gestation and birth of a human being, completed July 7 (however I will not yet declare which one was worse until I actually complete tenure), and boy do I miss y'all! I was back in the office on Wednesday, and this morning I was going through my 3 month old pile of Google Scholar Alerts and translating them into a pile of ILL requests and I kept thinking BOY CAN'T WAIT TO POST ABOUT THIS AND THIS. So not much to say other than I'm alive!

I do an in-class historical "simulation" every year when I teach about nuclear history, in which the students "play out" the negotiations that led to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. I always enjoy it (and they seem to as well, in part because it is in lieu of a formal midterm), but I am always interested in tweaking it, seeing if I can make it better.

This year I had the idea of assigning "points" in the end to the different delegations based on particular outcomes. Each delegation has a slightly different scoring system, meant to reinforce the priorities of their leaders in the simulation. (Part of the message is that delegations to the UN are hardly free to do whatever they please — there are national priorities and requirements imposed upon them by their bosses.) In "gamifying" the simulation like this, I'm hoping it makes more concrete some of the "goals" of the simulation. I worry a little bit that it might impose a little TOO much structure on it, but my hope is that a careful design will avoid that (and adding a few "wild card" options as well; I am going to let delegations offer trade deals that will count as extra points, and those will be relatively unstructured).

Anyway — just something I've been thinking about lately. I have seen other historical "simulations" (I looked at a number of the Brown University historical simulations, though mine is of a somewhat different character in some ways), but I haven't seen any that give explicit "points" as a way of explicitly incentivizing certain sorts of outcomes. We'll see how it goes...!

I've been doing more polar exploration reading and I found great amusement in some of the descriptions of shipboard newspapers. The construction of these newspapers and the writing of content to fill them (advertisements for shipboard entertainments, poetry, songs, etc.) was one of many ways crewmen entertained themselves and savored their leisure time, but this was not without pitfalls:

The men’s status as amateurs freed them from the restrictive standards of professional printing, and Hoag records many instances of amateurism, such as letter inversions and other small errors. Indeed, the trials of amateur printing were even a source of frustration for the papers’ anonymous contributors, one of whom, in the Winter Chronicle, lamented with comic pedantry the diminution in the quality of his submission because of faulty typesetting:

In my own communications, which are not numerous, I have discovered no less than sevenerrata, consisting of the DASHES altogether overlooked, one comma and two semicolons omitted; and once you and your devils, with a plague to you, made me come to a full stop when I had no such meaning. You must know very well that there is often more latent sense concealed under a single mysterious dash,—or a well-applied note of admiration! than in all the rest of a letter put together.

• "One of the bright objects that solace us in these regions": Labour, Leisure, and the Arctic Shipboard Periodical, 1820-1852", Erika Berisch Elce

Another paper, "Christmas at the Poles: Emotions, food, and festivities on polar expeditions, 1818-1912" by Shane McCorristine and Jane S.P. Mocellin, vividly evoked both the highs and lows of festive preparation:

As officers and men dined separately during the period under review, a ritual then followed in which the men would invite the officers to inspect their messes below deck. This was an opportunity for the crew to display the decorations, banners, and chandeliers they had made for the festive event. For example, Albert Hastings Markham and the other officers on Alert at Christmas 1875 were led by a drum and fife band below deck to the tune of ‘Roast beef of old England’ where they saw the men’s quarters ‘tastefully decorated with flags, coloured tinsel paper, and artificial flowers’ (Markham 1880: 195). Some years earlier, Leopold Francis McClintock commended his crew for their tables laid out ‘like the counters in a confectioner’s shop, with apple and gooseberry tarts, plum and sponge-cakes in pyramids, beside various other unknown puffs, cakes, and loaves of all shapes and sizes’ (McClintock 1859: 80).

Following this presentation, the commanding officer on naval expeditions would then make a point of commending the men on their sobriety and good fellowship, before departing for his own dinner with the officers (under a guarantee of discipline). Edward Belcher, a figure disliked by both men and officers, recorded his sense of loneliness and discomfort during these social situations. Indeed, he was perceptive enough to realise that after leaving his crew to celebrate their Christmas dinner of 1852 he was ‘possibly not missed’ (Belcher 1855, I: 192). The Moravian missionary Johann Miertsching, locked himself away on Christmas Day because of the drunken antics of the sailors onboard Investigator in 1850 (Miertsching 1967).

Officers on large British naval Arctic expeditions usually dined in the gun-room around 3pm, while the crew dined in the lower deck at mess tables around midday. For officers and crew, the pattern of dining was generally similar, with speeches preceding, and toasts accompanying, the meal, followed by anthems, songs, and dancing. Christmas dinner was usually made up of preserved vegetables, beef that had been kept frozen in the rigging, and local game, if any were available (typically musk-ox, polar bear, or caribou). Plum-puddings and mince-pies were also essential components of the traditional English Christmas at the time and the inclusion of these foods in the polar Christmas celebration acted, in the words of one officer, as ‘powerful stimulants to memory’ (Anon. 1852: 137), reminders that the men were connected through special food to their loved ones back home.

It's almost got me nostalgic for the holidays, and it's freaking October.

The fantastic old cemeteries of New Orleans deserve a word for themselves. On account of the shallow soil all burials are above ground. The wealthy lie in fantastic tombs, whilst less opulent citizens are enclosed in oven-like vaults along the ten-foot-thick brick walls of the necropolis. Of all these grotesque ossuaries, the old St. Louis Cemetery just outside the Vieux Carré is undoubtedly the most interesting. Lafcadio Hearn has written of it movingly & gruesomely somewhere in his “Fantastics”—which, by the way, I must re-read now that I’ve seen N. O.

• H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 11 Jun 1932

And I passed with him through the Egyptian gates, and beyond the pylons into the Alley of Cypresses; and he showed me the dwelling- place of the rich in the City of Eternal Sleep,—the ponderous tombs of carven marble, the white angels that mourned in stone, the pale symbols of the urns, and the names inscribed upon tablets of granite in letters of gold. But I said to him: "These things interest me not;—these tombs are but traditions of the wealth once owned by men who dwell now where riches avail nothing and all rest together in the dust."

• Lafcadio Hearn, "At the Cemetery" in FANTASTICS AND OTHER FANCIES (1914)

I've had a lot of downtime running computer simulations the past few days, so I've gotten a bit through "The Horse, The Wheel and Language". I have to say this is the single best popularization of a complex historic/linguistic/archaeological subject I have ever read by far.

Hi all, I am looking for any book recommendations regarding Hollywood in the 1930s-40s. I'm listening to the "You Must Remember This" podcast and I find it deeply fascinating. What would you guys recommend? Thanks in advance :)

What are some of the most remarkable, yet unconventional women in history?

I’ve recently been reading about Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth and I find her attitude and life to be so refreshing, especially for her time.

So I was wondering... what other remarkable, unconventional women could I read up on?

Thank you.

What are the limits of history and historiography? I feel like even primary sources are so biased and limited by a multitude of factors that it must be near impossible to truly get a holistic understanding of life in the past. I suppose we're not searching for a total understanding of the past, and that historians recognize that as impossible.

This might be the right place for this. I was wondering if anyone could point me the right direction.

I am trying to track down information about grand parents who participated in the dutch resistance during WWII. I was wondering if anyone knew a good place to start trying to track this kind of information? I have a native dutch speaker at my disposal so translation won't be an issue.

Thanks in advance!

I'm trying to research the Russian occupation of Finland 1714-1721 and almost all sources I can find available are Finnish or Swedish sources. Where can I look for Russian sources in English (if there are any) that concern this area? I feel very much out of my element here.

In older tanks, like those available during WW2, did the gunners have to sight in the main gun similar to how one sights in a rifle with a scope? How often did they make adjustments?

Those of you who have been in re-enactment battles, how do you register a "hit" with a blank firearm? Is it a real competition, or is it scripted like professional wrestling?

So after assassin's creed came out ive been listening to some stuff about ancient Greece and someone mentioned that after the trojan war that greece had undergone some type of calamity where alot of people disappeared or died and was resettled so to speak to become the city states of the Peloponnese wars. I have been trying to find some details on this but i either find stuff about the Trojan war or the odyssey. Any ideas on where to read what happened?

Apparently, someone put my answer to a question in the FAQ for prehistory. Just learned that tonight, nobody ever told me :P

How did that Russian exclave bordering the Baltic Sea come into existence?

Guys, assuming a similar development post-Civil War, what would the politics of the Confederate States look like if they managed to expand to THIS level:

https://billybennettbooks.wordpress.com/2015/07/01/alternate-history-map-north-america-1895-1914/

I think it's ridiculous, but how ridiculous was it?