Honestly the amount of people on Reddit, and IRL who are almost gleeful to rush to justify the use of nuclear weapons with a twist on 'it saved all those Japanese lives!' is staggering. I find it to be the coming together of a lot of unfortunate trends, between shallow nationalist focused primary school history curriculum, some still unprocessed good old yellow peril-ism and colonialist mentality(we had to kill so many to save the rest from themselves). With heaping helpings of the worn out falsely constructed 'bomb or invade' paradigm to ignore the actual agency, thoughts, biases, and agenda's of those involved in the closing months of the war in DC, Tokyo, and across the Pacific.

Frankly Ill be honest and say I have a hard to finding plausible circumstances in which at least one bomb is not used, but the way we get to two bombs in 10 days is a process full of holes, and decisions without much deep forethought or without full information. And the forcefulness with which certain participants rushed to obscure and justify in the years after should say a great deal about the rigor of the process that went into considering the manner, time, and goals of using this new expensive weapon.

I just submitted a new journal article, and I learned that I have an academic job interview next week*! Yay, but also ahhhh why am I posting here instead of writing my presentation...

(the two are, to the best of my knowledge, unrelated, but who knows maybe it's karma)

Hello all-

Having relentlessly plugged my website on the last two iterations of this thread, I see no reason to stop now.

Two weeks ago, I described my History of Rome in 15 Buildings, a series tracing the city of Rome's story from Romulus to the nineteenth century.

Last week, I outlined my latest series, Ten Buildings in Turkey.

And today, for your edification and delight, I introduce the next episode in the Turkey series: The Obelisk of Theodosius. This episode describes the circumstances that led Theodosius I to set up an obelisk in the Hippodrome of Constantinople in 391 CE, and the wildly dangerous chariot races that took place around it.

Dunno if this fits here (just discovered this place yesterday), but I need to get a little rant off my chest. I´ve watched the Netflix Rome "Documentary" series, and holy hell even me being probably not even a hobby historian could have made a 10 page list of inaccurate or straight up wrong descriptions, statements or illustrations. How the hell does garbage like that get produced? Normally I´m pretty okay with Netflix but why in the world do you produce a "documentary" to only have it as a wannabe Game of Thrones series. Why do historians sully their name to be a part of shows like this?

After close to a year of on-and-off preparation, I've finally formally announced my upcoming history podcast: The Siècle, a history of France between Napoleon and World War I. I'll be releasing the first episodes in January, a leadup primarily intended to let me build up a buffer of completed episodes for when I inevitable fall short of completing a new episode every two weeks. I've got Twitter and Facebook accounts for the podcast, and a placeholder website with a signup for an email newsletter; I'll be using all three to update people about the podcast before and after the release date. For example, this evening I posted a thread discussing the logo I made for the podcast. This is my first venture into the audio format or the serialized format and I'm super excited and a little nervous, so if anyone is interested, feel free to sign up at any of the above places! The content will include traditional political history, but also lots of social and economic history.

What's the history behind the term "Neo-confederate?" It seems like its only been popping up in the news over the last few years but a google trend search doesn't seem to align with that hypothesis.

I almost had a small crisis due to my neurotic tendencies this week. I came to a part in my thesis where I wanted to write about a certain topic and needed a particular article to use a basis for notes and subject matter. I knew what I wanted to write about but didn't want to start writing and find out I had been totally off base with the historiography of it.

I couldn't find it.

What was worse was that I did not know what the article or book had been titled nor the author of it - just the subject and a few pieces of information that I remembered.

I tore through my binders, printed out articles, and books to no avail. I searched for hours, going through the bibliography of the authors I had read recently, and through the articles I had. I posted on my FB about it and on a few FB groups about it. It wasn't until about late afternoon that a friend sent me some articles with a similar subject that triggered something in my mind, and after a few rabbit holes I finally found it. Turns out, I had never printed the article out or made note of it in my thesis so no wonder I could not find it.

​

I need to organize myself better. And after all that, I found out by going through my binder that I actually had taken notes of it, but the pages had been sandwiched between other notes.

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Oops.

In medieval europe, how much pre planning and strategy went into chasing a routed enemy army from the field? Was it usually just a free for all or was there an accepted “best way” to run down the enemy? Also, how much danger would the victorious soldiers be in as they followed the routing soldiers?

were c.s. lewis and meriwether lewis related to each other?