I just signed a contract to publish my first book! For anyone who was wondering about the hard research behind my answers* on the subreddit, you can now** read all about it!

If you're curious what it's going to be about and stuff, I wrote up a blog post here.

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* the answers for which I actually know what I'm talking about, at least

** at some point in 2020 probably

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I felt pretty depressed and burned out after completing the written exams for my PhD program last October, so much so that I made almost no progress on my dissertation prospectus in the months that followed, though I ended up receiving high passes and positive comments from my advisor and other committee members, to my own great surprise. Serious imposter syndrome, I suppose.

During those months of downtime, I indulged a little (or perhaps a lot) in my other historical interests, namely Ireland during the "Emergency" and the Chinese and Japanese armed forces in World War II, and in the process significantly expanded my collection of books and materials on these subjects (my notes include data on such arcane things as the development of the Irish Marine and Coast Watching Service and appointment lists of veterinary officers in the Kwantung Army). But I eventually returned to my primary research and am now happily immersed once again in the ancient world. Assuming that my prospectus turns out okay, I plan to do my dissertation on the Thracians who lived among non-Thracians during the Classical and Hellenistic periods, building upon Dan Dana's incredible Onomasticon Thracicum. And hopefully, in the future, I'll be able to answer more questions about Thracians here on AskHistorians. :)

I had a job interview today - not for anything academic/research related sadly, just more government-y admin stuff. I think it went pretty well, but obviously my brain is obsessed with the one answer I didn't like. It was a like 45 minute long interview and I can't stop thinking about ~15 seconds from the middle of it...

I’m not exactly sure how to ask my question and I’d like to try to ask it here with feedback for how to make my question more clear for the main page, or if it is clear and someone can answer it, then get an answer here in this thread.

I’m wondering about music written in the 1800s. So classical music? Today, we can hear some of what was composed because it was written out in a sheet music or because it exists in early recordings. But I am wondering if there was a lot of “amateur” compositions that would have been considered “low culture” kind of on the same level as much of what today is on YouTube and has earned fame even though it isn’t very good (ex: Rebecca Black’s Friday, Baby Shark). Do we know if that kind of music was written, performed and shared before widespread recordings and dissemination of music? Were there such professions as music critics back then, or was the music world more, “if you can manage to compose and conduct an orchestra to play your compositions then it is objectively “good””.Did people in the 1800s who played instruments compose their own pieces and perform/tour them around, even if they were amateur and no Beethoven. Do we have any examples today of what that music would have been like? Music that music critics and/or famous/talented composers would have considered sub par? Was this music ever popular among the masses despite its poor quality?

Anyways, a lot of questions that I’d love to hear some thoughts on, or help finessing my questions into something more succinct deserving of its own thread, as it might be too big of a question for this Friday free for all thread.

In my "studies" concerning the Netherlands in the Middle Ages, I have come across two separate events in which there was a conscious motivation to reclaim corporeal remains of nobles that were killed in, and buried on, enemy ground. The first one is the death of Count Willem II (who also was King of the Germans for a while) while campaigning in West Frisia in 1256, with his son Floris V reclaiming his father's buried (and hidden) corpse through means of killing and intimidating the West Frisians old enough to remember his burying place in 1282. The second instance is the death of William IV at the battle of Staveren in 1345; he was buried on the grounds of a local abbey, but his remains were nonetheless reclaimed by his nephew Albrecht in 1396.

This makes me wonder about the relation between (knightly) honour and corporeal remains. Aware of the normal subreddit rule of not asking for examples, I wanted to try my luck in the FFFA; I'm looking for instances, in a medieval context, where either wars were waged (if any) for the reclamation of lost honour resulting from the loss of corporeal remains, or simply where a victory had the additional benefit of creating the opportunity to reclaim such a corpse.

Much appreciated.

I guess this could be posted here it’s a minor question, how did Hitler convince soo many people that Jews are bad?? And how is it related to helping Germany grow stronger??

Has there ever been a push to add flair to questions that have been/have yet to be answered? It gets frustrating to always click on threads that have 20 comments for all of the comments to be deleted.