I recently picked up Douglas Boin's Alaric and have gotten about halfway through, and I am putting it here rather than in the book recommendation thread both because I want to write a longer review wen I finish it, but also because at the moment I am somewhat more interested in some of the meta issues around it than the book itself (which is quite good, to be clear). It roughly narrates "the beginning of the end"--the period from Adrianople to the Sack of Rome--with a focus on Goths in the empire and a thin veneer of a biography of Alaric, one of the most significant figures of the time.

It is a bit of a cliche that history books reveal as much about the time they are written in as the times they are written about, and even before Trump's election I have been curious about how "his" era would be reflected on writings about Rome. I was not quite prepared for just how direct it would be. Boin makes the very interesting literary choice of using unapologetically modern terms, talking about immigration, refugees, border security, family separation policy, and human trafficking (which is kind of funny, as that in itself is a bureaucratic euphemism for the traditional term of "slave trade") to discuss the ancient world. And this goes far beyond terminology: Maximinus is a commander and chief whose unconventional background arouses the ire of conservatives, Goths find themselves facing prejudice that they are violent and brutish and bear the mark of slavery, the Senate has abrogated its responsibilities to the emperor and thus, at the crucial moment, finds itself unable to govern, and regional identities are asserted as a way to keep out frightening foreigners (this last bit actually leads to one of the few direct historical marks against it, as unless there was a change I am unaware of between the early and late imperial periods, Boin is out of the loop on the nature of civic finance in the Roman empire, anyway).

I should note that this is all very much subtext and kept implicit, to the point that I suspect the book will be somewhat incomprehensible to readers in thirty years, and it is also very careful. There is the danger in this sort of thing of simply ploughing over history in the course of making a point about modern politics cough Hamilton cough and Boin does not do that. As a historian he is far too invested in particular debates about Rome to completely lose the plot, and he is also far too interested in narrating this particular period. This is not history being used as metaphor, this is history being written in such a way that forces the audience to see connections to the present day. There are aspects of Boin's political outlook I find rather limited, but this is a project I am deeply sympathetic to, and I am very interested to see other works of a similar nature in future days.

It is also just fabulously written, Boin has a talent for social commentary that I can without exaggeration compare to Juvenal. It is also a rollicking good story and if the book is not optioned for an HBO miniseries or something that would be a damning condemnation of the entire entertainment industry.

At some point in the movie 'Downfall' or 'Der Untergang' Hitler said something like "Thats what young people are for" in response to death of soldiers and Hitlerjugend. Is there a possibility that was a real remark of him? Did a quick google search but did not find anything.

So, here's a mind-blowing thing in my various historical readings over the last month or so:

I just finished my reading to get ready to write some articles about Greyhound, which comes out next week and is based on C.S. Forester's The Good Shepherd. In The Good Shepherd (which is itself a very good book), there is an explicit reference to Ultra (the British codebreaking effort). It's not by name, but if you know what Ultra was and its role in the Battle of the Atlantic, there can be no doubt what Forester is talking about.

The thing is that The Good Shepherd was published in 1955. Ultra wasn't declassified until the 1970s, and it was one of the most closely guarded secrets British intelligence had. So how the hell did Forester know about it over a decade and a half before it was declassified?

(Ironically, if the book is set any time after February 1, 1942, Forester gets it wrong - at that point in time the Germans had added a fourth rotor to the naval Engima machines, and the British couldn't break it until 1943. So, it's a reference to Ultra set in a time and place that Ultra wasn't actually providing the intel Forester's characters receive.)

Tabletop Wargaming Story time. I'm currently playing a historical wargame with some buddies online through stuff like discord, and we're refighting the Norman Invasion of Sicily/Italy. I am one of the Norman Commanders (technically a homebrew character but as we'll discover, that doesn't matter a great deal), serving under Roger Bosso. The future Count of Sicily.

Well, in our world anyway. Because this particular game is turning out to be exceedingly lethal. If a model is killed on the tabletop we have an injury table to roll on to see what happens to them. There's a 1 in 12 chance of death, with the rest being various injuries. And yet, every character but one who has had to roll on the table has died. Pretty much every historical figure and NPC we originally had set up for the campaign has been slain. Roger? Horse tripped going down a hill and he died. Robert Guiscard? Took just a ton of crossbow bolts to the face. My homebrew leader? I'm on the third one. And that's just the Norman side's casualties and yet we're winning. It's been a non stop curb stomping from the Norman side against all comers, which has resulted in the other teams losing characters even quicker.

At once point we had plans to introduce a chance of disease to spice things up, and now so many characters are dying we're instead trying to come up with ways to modify the dice roll just to keep people alive. The Pope was defeated in battle but his army got him off the field, so we gave the player rerolls on the injury chart to make it more likely for him to A) Survive and B) get some experience.

Three ones in a row. He was fated to die that day.

So yeah. Alternate history Sicily is just kind of cursed. But we can't stop laughing about the crazy things happening.

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When and why did it become standard practice to deliberately teach incorrect things in schools? It happens in almost every subject. In many schools, students are taught a succession of incorrect things, with each year the students being told to forget what they are taught the year before because its false. You can find high school textbooks with pictures of how wings work, even though the textbook printers know that the diagrams they’re showing are false, assuming that in later years it will be corrected. The problem is, most people never have the falsehoods they were taught in high school corrected in later years because they have to take specialized classes to learn that what they were taught was false in high school

History is the worst offender - virtually everything i was taught in school before college was false(even a good chunk of what i was taught in university was false too!), and the majority of the public operates their whole lives on this false conception of history because they don’t become historians. I recently saw a textbook belonging to a family members child that claimed people in England in 1066 would routinely rub their own feces on themselves to protect from disease, that they would deliberately poop in their water supplies and that British (specifically British!) nationalism existed since time immemorial.

I can understand the desire to create a foundation to build on, but is it really a foundation if everytime you learn something new everything you learned before needs to be torn down?

I feel like its a horrible educational process that does the opposite of creating knowledge. Instead of deliberately teaching false things that will later be corrected, why aren’t the “low hanging fruits” and actual foundations taught first? It just seems ridiculous and does a fine job of mass producing anti intellectuals.

Why and when was this process standardized?

Can anybody recommend a book on the French Army Mutinies of 1917?

Can we get a Hamilton mega-thread or stickied thread going? I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of questions about it for a while, and a central location might help.

While we're at it, a line-by-line historical analysis of the musical would be a great resource. I found one of sorts here but I don't if this was researched to the same standards as AH, and it still doesn't address every line. It just calls out the inaccurate lines instead of also identifying anything that is accurate.

I forgot to post this yesterday, but will do so now. I'll try and post it again next week.

I went a little overboard in collecting sources on the Tequila Valleys of Jalisco for my qualification exams. I'm only allowed a max of 150 sources. Nonetheless, I didn't want my efforts to go to waste so I put all the citations I collected into a Google Doc and published it. The bibliography is complete for the Tequila Valleys, but incomplete for all of West Mexico. The idea is that I would periodically add to it over time after my quals to make a more comprehensive West Mexico bib. Notably, I'm missing a lot of the literature for Michoacan. While I came across a lot of it, I didn't exactly have the time to add to it. I just wanted to share this with you all since it's a pretty good starting point to understanding the shaft tomb cultures of West Mexico from the perspective of the Tequila Valleys.

Also, I recently heavily revised the Wikipedia pages for Los Guachimontones and the Teuchitlan Culture which built guachimontones in the Tequila Valleys. I hope these are much more informative than the previous iterations of those pages.