Yesterday I received a very big grant to do research abroad, despite the fact that I had submitted a total bullshit application and not even once considered the possibility I would get it. Of course, I got the news the day after I had signed a lease for a new apartment...

Recently noticed that Amazon keeps suggesting "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" by Alfred Rosenberg to me. For those unaware he was a leading Nazi theorist, and this book was his seminal work on how Jews ruled the world, so it's kind of concerning to come up. Granted I have some books on the Holocaust saved, but they are academic works, not neo-Nazi stuff.

I'm at the end of my second week in my new job as collections manager in what I'd consider a mid-sized museum! (Museum sizing is very subjective. Most museums consider themselves small. My last job, I was one of two full time employees, and now there are actually departments, so I consider it mid.) I'm finding my feet and my way around. It's great!

Reposting here: A few months ago, while participating in a discussion group online I was exposed to a view of history asserted by Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. Summarized, his view is that all of ancient history (and a major chunk of medieval history) has been misinterpreted. That civilization has been around for only the last 1000-1500 years. “History” when correctly understood, is largely four lines of narrative “folded” on top of one another. “History” as we know it, and for intentions that may or may not (depending on who you ask) be benevolent, are these four lines of narrative either stretched out, laid end to end, or broken up and reformulated into what we recognize. To say the least I am skeptical of New Chronology, but I have done research. There is a bit of an online community that supports Fomenko’s claims, though they tend to come across as arrogant (as anyone with “The Truth” does). When asked about manuscripts that predate the supposed “dawn of civilization” they tend to redirect to the time in which these manuscripts are discovered (none before 500 AD, I think ?) They also throw out Carbon 14 dating as unreliable/illegitimate, and other than that, I’m largely ignorant of any other historical dating method. What do you think of New Chronology? Why does the mainstream Historical community reject it?

History university student here.

Studying Industrial Revolution as one of the topics for my exam. Pretty much studied most of the key themes like why Britain was first etc.

Can’t find anything on my reading list though for “Was the Industrial Revolution really Revolutionary?”

Anyone got any good book/article suggestions? (Preferably a concise chapter)

Today I learned that Ottoman pirates occupied the English Channel island of Lundy for five years in the 17th century: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lundy

I purchased the book The Case for Auschwitz after learning about the Irving libel case and being fascinated by the idea of having to prove a modern building existed in court.

After some horrified visitors looking at my bookshelf (where it is a large, obvious tome), I realized that, without knowing what the book is, someone could easily interpret it by the title alone as being an explanation in favor of Auschwitz.

So there are at least a few out there that think I'm a neo-Nazi because I tried to learn something new from a poorly named book.

As regulars are well aware, a long running problem for the subreddit is the mismatch between the comment count that reddit reports and the actual number of comments present in a thread. While there are real, legitimate reasons that reddit doesn't address this (it is a spam fighting measure, as I understand), that doesn't make it any less annoying!

Recently though, /u/almost_useless reached out to us to offer trying to tackle the problem, and they wrote up a script that displays the real comment count! Right now, it is more a proof of concept than a fully-functioning tool. A few mods have played around with it so far, and it is pretty neat, providing next to the reddit comment count an additional comment count which tracks only the visible, top-level posts, not including distinguished mod comments. That said getting some user feedback would be really nice to have before any further work is done, as it would give us the best sense of what can be improved.

As of now, this only works for the old reddit interface, not new.reddit, nor any mobile versions, but if you are interested in trying it out and giving us some feedback on how it impacts your experience browsing the subreddit, and how it might be improved, please do so!

Currently, as it is just a script, it requires Grease Monkey or Tamper Monkey (either works for Firefox, the latter only for Chrome) to run. If it proves useful and there are future versions, hopefully it will have an easier implementation, but for now, I'd suggest having some familiarity with how to use those extensions if you are interested in giving it a whirl.

The file can be nabbed here.

Could anyone recommend some books about the Renaissance period?