Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap

Friday, July 05 - Thursday, July 11

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This isn’t strictly a history question, but more a question of presently existing historical artifacts, so I’ll try this one here:

I love Roman ruins, and if I’m travelling anywhere that has them, I always try to make time to see them. Earlier this year, I was in Pondicherry, India, and saw the ruins of the Arikamedu trading post, and noted that these must be the farthest Roman ruins that I’ve seen from Rome. I’ve tried Googling this, but can’t seem to find an answer to this question: Where are the farthest existing Roman ruins from Rome?

Hi, I'm posting this to see if this topic would be of interest to this community. My Grandpa was in the Navy and involved in Operations Ivy and Greenhouse. He was present for two detonations on Enewetak Atoll. He is a member of the Atomic Veterans in the VA and at his last visit we met with a rep for this program who said she believes he is the last surviving service member for Operation Ivy. He was a shop steward on the USS Elder, which was a net-laying ship that deployed instrument buoys around the blast zone.

My sister and I will be sitting down with him next Thursday to videotape his account of the operation for our family. I would like to ask this community if they have specific questions for him. I am worried that simply recording his account will not be as complete as if we had questions from experts.

Please let me know if there is anything we should definitely ask him to talk about. He is very open to his speaking about his service, so I think anything will be okay. Thanks for any help.

Bad news, historians! Robots are taking your jobs :(

Hey, just a lurker taking this opportunity to thank all the prompters and the answering historians for their contributions. I've only been subbed for a couple weeks, but the discussions have been fascinating.

And thanks to the mod team for running such a tight ship. It's surprisingly strict, but the resulting output in the sub is really high quality imo. Keep up the good work

I'm about to do a study of medieval artifacts in publicly-accessible collections in my province (Canada), mainly as a PSA to other medievalists who may not be aware of potential primary-source research materials on this side of the Atlantic. Does anyone have any suggestions regarding how to make my descriptions of these objects (manuscripts, coins, odds and ends) more useful to potentially interested readers? Any other comments, precedents, etc., would also be welcome. Thanks.

Been making my way through The Submarine: A Cultural History from the Great War to Nuclear Combat more slowly than I would like, but I feel the argument falls apart in the chapter dealing from 1935-1965. The first two chapters were excellent, looking at how six different Naval Reviews from 1902-1977 potentially reflect different ideas about the submarine in culture in their respective time periods. The second dealt with the evolution of understanding around the submarine in the UK from 1900-1914, and how really from the outset the submarine was "militarized" and almost demonized in popular works.

The third deals with the years 1915-1935, and some aspects of the argument start to lose me. Redford attempts to construe the idea of the "Fleet Submarine" as one being entirely borne out of attempts to make the submarine palatable to a military culture that essentially worshipped a surface battle fleet, I don't entirely agree and I think he discounts how much of a period of experimentation the First World War truly was. He also doesn't really delve into British calls for the abolition of the Submarine in the interwar years, although does reference them. This chapter otherwise dealt with the British public and military's cultural reaction to German unrestricted warfare. None of it dealt with how they squared that with their own usage of the submarine.

That omission kind of bites the thesis in the butt in the fourth chapter, which deals with the years of 1935-1965. For Redford, the big shift in British thinking on the submarine occurs during the Second World War, which I think has some merit but not in the ways he necessarily states and there are some details of First World War British submarining that undermine some of his argument. For example, he states that the first ship sunk without warning by a British submariner was in 1940. Yet Martin Nasmith sunk a vessel without warning in Constantinople Harbor in 1915. Not a peep about this and the Navy's reaction to Nasmith doing such.

As well, he states that Max Horton and other submariners during the First World War only "allegedly" flew Jolly Rogers during the First World War, embracing the "pirate" image that some had thrust on submariners. It's not "allegedly", we have photographic evidence of at least one Submarine, HMS H5 flying one in 1916. There are many that attest to Max Horton starting the practice in 1914 with E9. And while it's true that not every submariner embraced this during the First World War (or even that the Admiralty approved of the practice), it was a bit more than allegedly and a discussion of this would have added more nuance to the picture. Furthermore, he states that the Admiralty didn't say anything about the practice during the Second World War, in almost the same breath as saying that Max Horton was Vice-Admiral Submarines during the Second World War (from 1940-1942), meaning that the man who started the practice was leading the Submarine Service for two years. That seems like an important detail to gloss over when talking about reasons that the Admiralty may have been silent on the practice.

Which brings me to my last point. Redford examines both the civil and corporate cultures, that is the overall sentiment and feeling of the general population and that of the Royal Navy's administration. But he doesn't really examine the culture of the Submarine Service itself and its interplay with those other two. Not once has he discussed what Submariners themselves felt they should be doing, their cultural practices, etc... except very briefly in the case of Jolly Rogers during the Second World War.

I just hope that the next chapter, about the Nuclear Navy, and the final chapter on the British submarine in film hold up. I'm really disappointed by this middle section. I think this is a really important angle to look at the submarine from, how culture effects its usage and perception and whatnot. In fact, I've had the same thought about potentially wanting to write something to that same effect about the United States Submarine Service. So it's a really great angle to take, and I'm glad Redford took this step, but I feel that by glossing over or dismissing what occurred with the British Submarine Service in the First World War, the later arguments start to fall apart a bit

This is a meta request, not strictly a history point. Sorry if this has been suggested before or if this isn't the place to mention this!

I really enjoyed reading through the discussion on how to attract more historians to this subreddit. Lots of great ideas that will be tricky to implement. As a reader of the forum, I understood the frustration of other readers who come to this sub looking for answers to interesting questions, only to be met with pages of deleted comments. It becomes a bit of a needle in a haystack to find questions that have been sufficiently answered.

My request is not to loosen any of the guidelines the mods have set out. I think they're super important to keep the quality and accuracy as high as it is. On the other hand, as a reader, I would love to see a flair get added to questions that HAVE been successfully answered, much like what happens on r/whatisthisthing with it's "solved" flair. As a non-historian, I have nothing to say until that successful answer is there, but it's difficult to even find the threads with answers.

Could the mod who finally approves a quality post can add an "Answered" flair? This would at least let other people know the thread is now available for follow up questions. I don't know if adding that flair would dissuade additional historians from participating though.

Next week's Tuesday Trivia theme is People Using Technology!

Come share your stories about refrigerated railroad cars revolutionizing the beer industry, engineers in Mission Control talking to people on the moon, medieval blacksmiths in their forges...talk about cool technology and the people who used it!