I forgot to post this on time for the Friday topic last week, but will repost it now

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.

I'm working on a bit of a side project (That has little to do with the sub, just random fun.) and I'm looking for assistance and suggestions. Its an easy question, and these are early days so I'll likely post this again in a few places. But the big question IS:

WHAT... is your favorite AskHistorians post? Which one made you sit up and go "Wow!"? I know I'm preaching to the choir a bit here but jeeze there are just so many options. Seriously, check out some of these profiles and the amazing stuff people have written. Pretty much every week I'm aggressively harassing people nearby to tell them about what I've been reading. (I'm locally famous amongst bus regulars! Well, usually anyway. Not a lot of busing right now.)

And there's funny stuff to! Every couple of weeks I go back and chuckle at How did the Eagles manage to rescue Frodo and Sam at Mt Doom and still have time to record "Hotel California"?

One of my current love-to-share favorites is /u/poob1x exploring how to synthesise modern drugs with medieval technology. When they finally open Area 51 and make time travel cheap and affordable for the masses, things are going to get interesting.

It's been a while since I've been about, but the study on the Yarm helmet was published this week and the verdict was stunning - its (probably) genuine 10th cent Anglo-Scandinavian! There's a lot to argue about over the specific dating (the wide estimate is 6-12th cent) but it was thought a fake for a pretty long time, and it now brings the count of complete-ish authentic viking helmets up to (hopefully) 2!

It's a genuinely fun read too - there's a fairly interesting section on what a fake from the time period would likely have looked like https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00766097.2020.1755126?fbclid=IwAR1N7RgEKoqvU8p3KF6eZnSsb3Jnv9TmZAephVSm-dltvJaPjPWYZmTD9PU&journalCode=ymed20

Hello all-

As part of my ongoing project "Questions about Ancient Greece and Rome (you were afraid to ask in school)," I recently posted a video on the origins of the Atlantis story. As always, follow-up questions and suggestions for improvement are welcome.

I've been reading Tyrants of Syracuse: War in Ancient Sicily by Jeff Champion lately and I've found myself a little disappointed that it goes into such a blow-by-blow discussion of the individual battles while barely providing much else in the way of socio-political context that isn't directly related to the fighting of the wars.

For example the book gives a metric ton of backstory about the political reputation of various Athenian generals, but glosses over entirely the reason for the Carthaginian invasion of 407. When the rebellions of 552 are discussed, there's no real investigation of what a rebellion even means in this era.

I realize that this is within the scope of the book's title and it's not like I got a bait and switch, it's just that I'm a history teacher and I've noticed that a lot of my fellow history teachers like to get really down in the weeds about individual battles instead of digging into the bigger picture things or even the minutiae of anything else, like laws or customs or the role of religion or whatever. Like that's all somehow window dressing to the important part -- i.e. battle strategy. It's not like we don't have reams of information about WWI or WWII, which is where I see this phenomenon most often, so it can't just be that we're working from limited records.

What gives? Am I working with a skewed sample? Are there more appropriate books I should be looking at? Overall I'm more unsatisfied with this one than I was expecting. By contrast I've really enjoyed Mary Beard's work.

Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap

Friday, July 03 - Thursday, July 09

###Top 10 Posts

###Top 10 Comments

If you would like this roundup sent to your reddit inbox every week send me a message with the subject 'askhistorians'. Or if you want a daily roundup, use the subject 'askhistorians daily'. Or send me a chat with either askhistorians or askhistorians daily.

See my wiki to learn how to customize your roundups

####Please let me know if you have suggestions to make this roundup better for /r/askhistorians or if there are other subreddits that you think I should post in. I can search for posts based off keywords in the title, URL and flair. And I can also find the top comments overall or in specific threads.

Hamilton buzz is back. I had some question earlier this week in regards to it that I thought of asking today, but now I forget it. So instead I’ll ask: what other historical figures, events, or topics would you like to see adapted into a smash hit stage production, be it play or musical (probably musical, since those are more popular with general audiences)?

As someone interested in both history and playwriting, there are a number of topics that I’ve been interested in adapting, such as the gunpowder treason plot, and Ludwig Zamenhof creating the language Esperanto.

Does anyone know where I can find a copy of janes fighting ship online for free?