Today:
You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.
As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.
We ran a virtual workshop from Dr Mary Lewis in our Department of Archaeology about her new course in Professional Human Osteoarchaeology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCMWEwZ7qM
Dr Lewis is keen to do an AMA if there's interest, but we're fairly confident that the AskHistorians community would like to get tips and tricks on excavating human remains and piecing together clues to build a picture of how that person lived and died.
I am going to my first ever academic conference tonight. I am giving a paper on the Chinese Exclusion Act, and I'm both nervous and excited. Any advice for a first time presenter?
Horse or Dragon? - Folklore Thursday published a short piece of mine for May Day - the Cornish 'Obby 'Oss of Padstow. Enjoy!
sunagainstgold suggested I ask this here, since it's not really a question that benefits from academic rigour:
How appropriate is it for non-Nêhiyaw/Cree to refer to historical figures using their given names? I've heard that using their name after a person's death is disrespectful. Should history books use descriptions of historical figures instead (when possible)?
What about in historical fiction? I think I'm supposed to ask an Elder to give me a name for a character, but what if anxiety makes that impossible? (I haven't found anywhere online I can ask questions of elders, and struggle with going non-verbal, or having panic attacks when speaking in person.) Should I refer to her as 'Nêhiyaw-iskwesis' ('Cree Woman') for now? Choose a name like 'Mâkwa' ('Loon') that is common enough to not be too personal? Something else?
So I put a different but functional version of my email address (á la gmail dot trick) in my last paper. Now I got my first spam email to that address. It's only like 70 days since the print journal came out; the paper isn't even online yet. I guess they must be scraping one of the indexes.
Spam was ad for the scam/vanity journal 'History Research’. Or is it a scam? I mean it seems they're upfront that they want you to pay nearly $600 in a fee to publish with them, it's also pretty obvious from what they've actually published that they'll publish anything you send them.. (this is at least amusingly bad..) Honestly the difference between this and a 'real' pay-to-publish open-access journal like PlosONE is a pretty fine one. (perhaps pointing in a flaw or at least vulnerability in the whole pay-to-publish model)
I'm more surprised people would really pay hundreds of dollars to essentially vanity-publish an article. (but apparently..) Just put it on vixra.org , people. (it's arXiv.org for the papers that are too obviously batshit to be published on arXiv)
I teach an introductory world history class at a high school level. This year I challenged myself to update the course massively to include more civilizations from India and Africa (and to a lesser degree, China after the Qin), where many of my students are from originally. But I'm finding that my lessons on those places are... Lacking. They're decent enough, but they don't have the engaging anecdotes, interesting artifacts to analyze, or 'moral of the story' themes.
Could anyone share some ideas for teaching the Gupta or Maurya empires, or the Han, Tang and Song, or Axum and Ghana? If you're a historian who has a background in those, what 'key concept' would you want students to know if they forget everything else about them?
Today I finished my first year of undergrad and first year of my bachelors degree in history! I was able to take a pretty wide variety of courses from a course on modern Islamic history to one on the World Wars in Europe as well as a few others as I go to a small-medium sized liberal arts school! I’ve never been so sure of my major and career choice or of anything really, and I discovered that for now I actually like research as I wrote my first real big person papers this year! But who knows how long that shiny newness that will last!
Why didn’t Rome conquer Arabia
On a tour of the Colloseum, the guide told us that Gladiators used to battle animals and that the “African Griffin” became extinct as a result of the insatiable Roman appetite for Gladiatorial battle. What insanely inaccurate things have you been told by tourist guides?
So this is my firstime in reddit....and im kindda history junky....is there any room/forum relating to ptolemy map...im kinndda digging into chersones / khersonese island...that ptolemy mentioned in his map....just trying to get info on mount ophir...and the rich region that hold the surrounding kingdom on ptolemy time...sorry if my fact is all over the place xD