My brother has a rough draft due tonight. for his AP European History 25 page paper. A few months ago I wrote about how he was going to do it on the lead-up to World War One. He changed his mind, since his inital thesis wasn't all that good - so now his paper is on the representation of WWI in film and how that lines up with the reality. Again, a topic he chose because I like it. I have helped give him resources, and discussed his ideas and questions with him (not to mention watched movies), but all 25 pages have been his own work. I'm super proud of him. And while he procrastinated more than I would have liked to see him have, he was farthest along on this paper earlier this week (on tuesday he had like 18.5 pages done, the farthest of his classmates also writing the 25 page paper. One kid only had four done).

So now he's finishing up editing, and then he sends the rough draft off to his teacher. He'll get that back, do more revision, and then he will actually present it to a group of panelists (other teachers from the school).

I'll use this free for all to say thank you so much to everyone who contributes answers to this subreddit. Almost any question I can think of has been discussed here in depth, and frequently answered with citations and further reading suggestions. I appreciate everyone's time!

Regarding the Versailles treaty—I am no pro-German, & was all for the defeat of Germany when she challenged Anglo-Saxon dominance, but I do think the peace of 1919 was an absurdly disastrous example of rubbing in a victory. It would have been better to whip Germany more decisively in the field & burden her less afterward—for any incubus like the existing one formed a certain barrier to international recovery. A powerful & vital nation formed a certain barrier to international recovery. A powerful & vital nation cannot be set upon indefinitely. If Germany can’t get better terms, she can never prosper—hence it is only sound patriotism for a German to insist on the revision of Versailles results. Of course Hitler is doing this crudely & tactlessly—but his bark may be worse than his bite. We cannot yet tell how much real war-peril lies in the current Nazi position. It is always to be remembered, though, that such positions are liable to gradual mellowing & modification.

• H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, Oct. 1933

In October 1933, shortly before Lovecraft wrote this, Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations and the World Disarmament Conference, signalling his repudiation of the Versailles Treaty and move to German rearmament. Lovecraft was pretty quiet about the end of the war in 1919; but in 1933 he could parrot the popular interpretations regarding the end of the conflict, that Germany had not been defeated in the field - the stabbed-in-the-back myth - and make a call for moderation.

We have the benefit of hindsight, and know how serious Hitler was in his preparations for war - and the Holocaust. Lovecraft did not. In the face of a rising evil, he took the moderate, centrist view. This time, he was wrong. He did not live long enough to know how wrong.

I got a revise & resubmit from a journal a few months ago and have seriously struggled to carry out the revisions—I've been trying to push through it and today I have finally (mostly) finished! I still have some proofreading and cleaning up to do on it, and I'd like to get feedback from my advisor before resubmitting, but there were definitely moments last month where I thought the article would be a mess of track changes and red text forever, so this is a major improvement.

In other news I recently discovered that this online archive of the BBC Radio Times exists and I have lost at least one afternoon to it already this week.

Confirmed: Crocodiles cause lunar eclipses.

For those studying history at a higher level than Undergraduate

• Did you pursue history with a targeted to plan to specialise in that area?
  • or...
• Did your school and programme of study dictate your choice of speciality?

I'm interested in history but not sure I want a career in academia (like as a college professor). I've also been considering criminal psychology. Is there any merger between the two, or options to consider that are outside academia?

I got a job interview for next week. I'm both excited and nervous because it's over the phone. It's for a well known historic site and an amazing chance to work at a site like this.

What books are you guys currently reading?

My MIL is looking to increase her knowledge of history, what movies would you recommend (and in what order) would you recommend for each "Era"?

I've been mulling over an idea for a good year or two, and would appreciate anyone's two cents!

Good journalism views current affairs through a historical lens, but journalists typically don't have the space or remit to explain events in adequate historical depth. More importantly, one event is often not connected to another, or to a wider phenomenon. As an example, the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil (and his ominous first week in office) has been reported quite widely, but few articles tie his election in any meaningful way to the general current trend toward right wing leaders and demagoguery, and fewer still situate this within a broader historical context.

The next consideration is that, while I love and value very highly the work that professional historians do, it is difficult to find more than a few concrete examples of academic historical knowledge being adequately and widely popularised. /askhistorians is the best of these examples, though there are others. This is partly the fault of publishers who lock their articles behind a pay wall, but that is only one factor. As a society, we need more ways to engage the public in good, thoughtful history that, it we're not being too ambitious, can hopefully shed some light on today's problems.

I'm not going to fix this, but a small contribution I can make is to start a blog that is a kind of 'explainer' of current affairs. While necessarily opinionated, it would disclaim its biases and shortcomings, while offering a historical approach to today's concerns. It would seek to tie together multiple strands: events, past and present, threaded through with what I think is the common denominator. It would strike (I hope) a balance between concision and viewing things over the longue duree.

I live in Australia. In two weeks (26 January) we will have our national day of celebration. It is that victorious day, we are told, when the 'First Fleet' from England sailed the land they named Australia, declaring it terra nullius, and claiming it in the name of King George III. It is also the day the British-perpetrated genocide of Indigenous Australians began. We still celebrate it today.

If I were to write about this for this suggested blog, I would try to eschew the inward-gazing attempts commonly made at explaining the controversy surrounding Australia Day. Rather, I would consider how many countries around the world have shameful elements to their past, that one leader or another (it not more) have tried to efface, to whitewash, to strike from the historical record and the public consciousness. To this day, the Turkish government emphatically denies any suggestion of a genocide perpetrated against its Armenian population during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

We need to consider 2019's problems (I believe) from not only a historical perspective, but one that tries to find the commonalities, the shared ground. Is this ideological? I know it's not a particularly original idea, and there might be more people doing this kind of thing in the States, but here it is pretty rare as far as I can tell.

Here is your chance to share your thoughts, suggestions, and (who knows) condemnations!

My working title for the blog is 'Speak, Memory' (thanks Nabokov).