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.
A number of publishers who put their ebooks on Muse have made their stuff free to access for the next few months. The list keeps growing too!
Check them out here: https://about.muse.jhu.edu/resources/freeresourcescovid19/
Fell down a rabbit hole this week. Back in 2016 there was a case of plagiarism - an author submitted an old pulp story as their own - and it snuck past the editor and made it into the book. Readers spotted it almost immediately, and all traces of it were removed from the edition, but I got to looking at it and noticed some textual difference...
Textual analysis isn't something that folks normally think about in terms of pulp studies, but it's a valuable tool, tracing the development of a text from the drafts, typescripts, manuscripts, and published versions of it that we have. We like to think of a given work as "the story" but any good historian will tell you that all sorts of things can happy as a text is copied, re-copied, published, edited, translated, etc.
Sometimes the results are substantial and interesting; the weird trek of Dracula in Sweden is a fascinating example.
Anyway, anyone curious to see what my nosing around turned up, you can read about it on my blog.
Hello all-
Partly in response to a general surge in curiosity about ancient diseases, and partly to remind myself that we - unlike our ancestors - are not completely helpless in the face of the current crisis, I recently made a short video about how the Greeks and Romans dealt with epidemics. If you're so inclined, you can watch it here. Hope you enjoy it - and stay safe, everyone.
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, March 20 - Thursday, March 26
###Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 9,766 | 154 comments | I am Louis XIV and am about to have sex with my wife or mistress, do I leave my wig on or take it off? |
| 7,275 | 106 comments | In the painting 'February' from Très Riches Heures (1416, France), two people are explicitly depicted warming themselves in front of a fire with their genitals exposed. Why? Was this normal practice in the winter? Would people at the time have been surprised by the painting? |
| 5,562 | 66 comments | A Hadith quotes the Prophet Muhammad as saying “If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place.” Was restricting travel during the outbreak of a disease common practice during this time or earlier? |
| 5,369 | 127 comments | Before Christianity, Greeks buried their dead with coins in their mouths to pay the ferryman in the afterlife. But coins were only invented at the end of the 7th century BCE. Was this a tradition that postdated the invention of coinage, or an existing tradition adapted to include coinage? |
| 4,972 | 56 comments | How did the Illuminati, a historical liberal Bavarian society, become the catch-all term for secret cabals and conspiracies? |
| 3,886 | 61 comments | Did the 1918 epidemic move geopolitics to the Left? |
| 3,717 | 73 comments | Sad women comforting themselves with chocolate is a common stereotype. Before the arrival of chocolate in the old world, was there another food stereotypically desired by sad women? And when did the chocolate stereotype come from to begin with? |
| 3,689 | 60 comments | [Great Question!] Where would a middle or upper class black person store their wealth during the early 20th century. Were banks segregated? Could my money go “missing”? |
| 3,147 | 72 comments | Would a Survivor of a Lightning Strike in Ancient Greece Just be Considered Lucky, or Would they be Ostracized for Having Somehow Offended Zeus? |
| 1,257 | 40 comments | Why wasn't Australia colonised by Asians or Pacific Islanders? |
###Top 10 Comments
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I'm trying to get a sense of how common large fires were in cities, and how much better is it with modern buildings and fire prevention.
I feel like this probably varies a lot with time and place, and I don't know enough about fire prevention history and architecture to even say when "modern" starts...
Do you guys know of good resources to try and look into this, or even just suggestions to narrow my scope? I feel like I don't know enough to even ask a good question here yet.
I'm trying to read a book on the Warlord Era in China, but the Wade-Giles is actually killing me right now. I know it's probably common enough in the historiography that I should just suck it up and get used to it, but switching between Wade-Giles and pinyin is so irritating.