The autumn flair purge seems to have hit the Asia category pretty bad. We've managed to lose 11 Asia flairs, taking us down to 20 plain Asia flairs, plus 1 dual-speciality user flaired under Europe and 2 or 3 flaired for milhist. Please, if you have a good few answers on Asian topics in the last 6 months, apply for flair!

(Also to be a little nitpicky /u/dandan_noodles' flair on the list is still the red instead of the green one. Mods pls fix)

Hello all-

As some of you may, more or less reluctantly, recall, I plugged my online History of Rome in 15 Buildings in last week's thread. Those interested in my trademark method of using buildings and monuments to explore (mostly ancient) history might also enjoy my current project on toldinstone.com: Ten Buildings in Turkey.

This ongoing series employs ten ancient and medieval buildings located in modern Turkey to investigate overlooked episodes in premodern history. At the moment, only two episodes are finished.

The first episode, the Walls of Herakleia, uses a well-preserved circuit of Hellenistic city walls to explore the chaotic period that followed the death of Alexander the Great, when a half-dozen of the conqueror's generals competed for control of (manageable chunks of) his empire.

The second episode, Mren Cathedral, takes a ruined church in the steppes of northeastern Turkey as a point of departure for the cataclysmic Byzantine-Sassanian War of 602-28, which effectively ended the classical world.

All the best

But for all his one-sided theories Bob is a great boy. I don’t take his mercenary talk seriously—it appears to me merely a sardonic rhetorical reaction against certain types of the soulful artistic poseur whom he has met and disliked. There is nothing commercial in the way he spreads whole Iliads and Odysseys of the southwest over letters of 15 to 20 closely typed pages, and with a poetic fire and unconscious art which only a finely-developed intellect and imagination could command. Whether he likes it or not, he is a genuine creative artist—and of a depth and energy which will carry him far if he doesn’t let his perverse external anti-intellectualism frustrate his genius. It is because I have such a high and admiring opinion of his capacities that I am trying to argue him out of his anti-civilised attitude. I have repeatedly urged him to utilise his fine ability and deep erudition in writing a history of Texas—as well a a vivid, coördinated account of the various frontier desperadoes. He could certainly produce something magnificent in this line if he would only buckle down to it. As to the reason he doesn’t grind out cheap western stories for the pulp magazines—I’ve never asked him, but I fancy it i because he knows and loves the West too well to be able to work within the puerile, artificial convention of commercial “Western stuff”. For all his talk of purely monetary objects, he isn’t the sort to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage—and I can imagine how he must feel about the grotesque, absurd caricatures which pass as “western fiction” among easterners. To a chap who knows the west as the everyday life around him, the concoction of stock “westerns” must be the next best thing to an impossibility. [...] By the way—I seem to detect a slow, steady improvement in Two-Gun’s output. His last W T stories (I’m reading up the recent issues at last) are far ahead of his earlier average. As for Two-Gun’s grisly and casual reference to the refined custom of testicle-crushing and pubic epilation—I must admit that I never heard of such a thing before, and have no idea as to where and by whom it is cultivated!

• H. P. Lovecraft to Bernard Austin Dwyer, 23 Apr 1933, Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others 473-474

One of the things to "keep current" in pulp studies involves going through the latest collections of Lovecraft's letters as they are published and seeing what tidbits there might be...and this came to my eye. Part of this letter had previously been published in volume four of the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, but this portion of the letter has never been published before, as far as I'm aware. Some good insight into Lovecraft's opinion on his friend and correspondent Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan the Cimmerian). REH actually would turn to westerns later in his life, including straight stories like "The Vultures of Wahpeton" (Smashing Novels Dec 1936), humorous westerns like "A Gent From Bear Creek" (Action Stories Oct 1934), and weird westerns like "Old Garfield's Heart" (Weird Tales Dec 1933). He never did write a history, though Lovecraft and others encouraged him to.

I've hidden this in spoilers just in case as this is probably NSFW....anyway, I can't help but think that some of the ancient writers were actually writing erotic fantasies rather than treatises on horse breeding. These were two of the recommendations/stories I saw in a book I'm reading.

!On the subject of mares, Virgil advised that a mare should be underfed and "harassed with work and denied shelter, so that there will be no furrows of fat to dull their sensual pleasure, and that in this starved condition they will greedily suck in the semen of the stallion, and keenly desire to be covered."!<

!Another item I came across is from Aristotle. He tells the story of a high-bred mare of the king of Scythia whose offspring were all of splendid quality. The king wanted to mate the mare to one of the colts, but the colt refused to do his "duty." So they covered the mares head with a wrapper, and the colt did his work. Upon removing the wrapper, the colt ran away and threw himself off a cliff.!<

I haven't seen the original source material myself, instead I found these in Horse Breeding in the Medieval World by Charles Gladitz. My reaction upon reading these....

I just wanted to say thank you again for featuring my answer about WWI Naval Battles on the Facebook page. It means a lot to know that people read and enjoy what I write!

Just finished reading The Plot to Destroy Democracy by Malcom Nance regarding the 2016 election tampering.

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Any other intelligence-community recommendations regarding RF-KGB activity in the 21st century? This book covers a lot but it's mostly about what they did, and how America reacted. I'd like to read more in-depth about the Russian mindset and their approach to an ever-changing international system. Basically, I want to read about the "why?" when it comes to Russians.

I am looking into dual majoring into history, in no small part due to this sub. Does anyone have any advice?

I'm wondering if any U.S. Senators or Congresspeople during World War II had sons serving in the war and who they were?