What are some good historical riddles? It seems like theres a lot of cultures and peoples who've put a lot of stock into riddles and word games. I was discussing this with a friend but we had trouble searching for many actual historical ones. (Ended up getting lots of fantasy ones instead. The Hobbit and such.)

Riddles seem like a pretty fun game for the next pub night.

What are some good books for eastern european late-medieval / early modern history. Poland-lithuania, Baltics, Russia, etc. Thanks.

I'll tell you a frustration I'm having lately about history and historical allegory in fiction... "Every Villain is Hitler"

In my current Bookclub we're reading "Star Wars: Bloodlines" which the basic premise is the political conflict between the "Centrists" and the "populists" with Leia being the leader of the populist faction while a younger male senator is a member of the Centrists: they start as enemies and become friends.

Anyway, this young senator is an avowed monarchist and wishes for a new true Monarch.

The people in my Bookclub can't understand why Leia would be "friends with a literal Nazi!"

I tried to talk them away from that line of thinking and talk about things like Constitutional Monarchies or the concept of Enlightened Absolutism. And that not every villain is Hitler, even if the uniforms are based on them. The world of politics is more complicated than that. And that the Rise and Fall of Napoleon III is a closer historical allegory to the Empire than Hitler and the Weimar Republic

But it didn't do any good. Every villain they've known in fiction is based on Hitler in some way or another.

It just feels that people have become extremely ignorant to the actual rise and evils of Nazism because they're only exposed to it through fictional caricatures, and can only see things through the lens of "Democracy vs Nazis"

What do you think?

When you know so much about a subject and have collected so many primary sources, it is interesting to note what gets dismissed and what gets revealed when they write their own narrative. I've always loved movies, so after growing up and becoming formally trained in an unrelated area of history, I began to also indulge my hobby of film history. An acquaintance was a Kubrick scholar and provided inspiration which started me on researching my own favorite director, whose life is eventful...to say the least.

My favorite director is Oliver Stone. Why? Seeing his movies (first as a teenager) made me feel emotions that no other films aroused in me, especially as I am an American and his films often interrogate American identity and politics. He is also the anti-Terrence Malick, in the sense that hardly any writer or interviewer has ever had their request to Stone turned down, resulting in an abundance of primary sources over the last 40 years. I've read Stone interviews in everything from Film Comment to a prison magazine published by inmates. (Hunting in library databases is one of my favorite things.) So what to expect from his newly released autobiography, Chasing the Light, his own accounting of the first 40 years of his life? Stone has two big advantages as a memoirist: he writes prose very well, and he has an almost compulsive need to lay himself bare. Despite ending on a triumph (the night Platoon swept the 1986 Oscars), the book is more a catalogue of heartbreaks and humiliations than anything else.

This is actually the second autobiographical book Stone has published. The first, A Child's Night Dream, was a novel he began as a teenager, cleaned up some as an adult, and finally published in 1997. The main character in that book (also named Oliver Stone) shares many similarities with the author's real life, but there are enough surrealistic stream-of-consciousness changes to the timeline to push it into fiction. Chasing the Light is a more straightforward memoir, though it can be roughly divided into three sections (his personal life, the Vietnam War and film). I wrote a bunch of notes (can share the others if interested) but thought the parts about the war would be most relevant.

-Oliver Stone volunteered for the draft in 1967 and served a 15 month tour of duty in Vietnam, first with the 25th Infantry Division and then later with the 1st Cavalry Airmobile (U.S. Army). He was in a total of four units, three of them combat units. He was decorated with a Purple Heart with oak leaf cluster (two wounds) and Bronze Star with V device, among other awards. The reasoning for volunteering for the draft was mixed somewhere between patriotism and suicidal ideation (letting "God sort it out" because although he had the wish, he could not kill himself).

-In a 1995 biography of Stone by James Riordan (and a later documentary), Stone's fellow soldier Sgt. Larry Robinson describes the horrific ambush which resulted in Stone's second wounding. He credits Stone with saving his life. There are no such details in Chasing the Light, where Stone dispatches with his injuries in a single sentence. (Due to other interviews, I'm aware that he still has occasional health problems related to the shrapnel still in his body, and was also left permanently deaf in one ear due to combat-induced hearing loss.)

-The lack of details may be because, both times he was wounded, Stone was knocked unconscious. He does describe a third occasion where he experienced a temporary loss-of-consciousness (LOC) from a concussive blast from a beehive round but had no other injuries so did not receive medical treatment. He acknowledges being concussed but still remaining on duty. I mention this because I'm aware of the post-Iraq War recognition of combat-related TBIs. (See, for example, this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4255273/) Post-Iraq, it's been discovered that there is a strong comorbidity between TBIs and PTSD in veterans, as well as substance abuse - both things Stone struggled with later and details in this memoir.

-Stone devotes significant pages to the New Year's Battle of 1968 aka Firebase Burt, which he found almost surrealistic, "both terrible and divine." He is no military historian, but the value lies in his vivid, almost poetic first person account of the adrenaline and confusion. Memories of the battle were sparked by seeing bicentennial fireworks on July 4, 1976 - the fireworks "terrified" him but recounting the battle became his starting point for the Platoon script.

-I found Stone's description of the PTSD he suffered after the war the most poignant part of the book. He recounts hitting the deck when hearing a car backfire on the street, edgy insomnia, random rages, mental confusion - but most of all he describes feeling like the Other in a society that left him behind: "No one understood me. My rage was talking to me faster than my mind. I was unhinged, and others could sense it; they avoided me. I became more isolated, more paranoid." He unashamedly took refuge in drugs, because the high was something he could control when he felt like his mind was spiraling, and he hated the reaction to people learning of his status as a veteran, whether it was morbid curiosity ("Did you kill anyone?") or pity. At the same time, he desperately wanted someone who understood, who didn't think of him as weird or messed up. "The way they looked at me, I was apart." Most of all, he seems to have craved a connection to any other combat veterans, which he could not find, not even in New York. It is easy to see why he and Ron Kovic formed such a deep and immediate connection when they first met to collaborate on Born on the Fourth of July. Stone's lack of initial support as a veteran from both society and his family clearly left a very deep scar.

-It will not be a revelation to learn that Stone considers the war itself a moral crime. Though Stone has said (most recently last week in a New York Times profile) that he personally has made peace with the War, it's striking that in the memoir he continually describes worrying - at every setback in life - that maybe the war broke something fundamental in him, he was "too messed up." He writes that "I was darkened. A part of me had gone numb there...died, in Vietnam, was murdered."

-Stone seems puzzled at points when reflecting on his history of impulsivity and risky behavior. When he writes that a doctor partially ascribed it to a dopamine deficiency found in Stone's brain, I'm guessing that the doctor actually found a lack of dopamine receptors, which are like the safety valves that stop the flood of dopamine in the brain. An intriguing study (http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1869106,00.html) did find a possible connection between high-risk people and low dopamine receptors, i.e. "people who take risks get an unusually big hit of dopamine each time they have a novel experience, because their brains are not able to inhibit the neurotransmitter adequately. That blast makes them feel good, so they keep returning for the rush from similarly risky or new behaviors." There also happens to be a proposed connection that TBIs can damage dopaminergic activity (https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/aan/64760). I do wonder if there is a connection.

I recently brought The Search for Modern China (Third Edition), which I'm greatly enjoying. In the Preface to the Third Edition, Professor Spence mentions "extensive cuts to the text" made in the process of re-writing the book.

Is anyone aware of the extent of these cuts? I'm wondering whether it's worth it buying the second edition (now substantially cheaper than the third edition).

Thanks!

Here I go! I’ve been thinking about this for a while, was there a certain US State that sent out more soldiers during WW2, Vietnam and Korean wars?

The question stems from the fact that certain states have a real love for guns so I would assume would be somewhat trained at shooting.

In particular, WW2 had non-career soldiers, so a school teacher that can shoot a gun would be more valuable than a teacher who can’t.

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I don’t know how to make a post questioning as I am new to this, but I would like to know if anyone knew any good books on Ecuadorian history?

What is the deal with all the decoratively arranged bones in mausoleums and catacombs? Who did that kind of thing, was it their job, do we know what people thought of it at the time?

Say, anyone here knows a memoir/primary source from the Franco-Prussian War? Preferably English, but in other language is okay as long it's accessible on the net. Some memoirs that i'm particularly looking for are ones from:

- A German soldier

- A German Red Cross member

- A French Cantiniere

- An Algerian Tirailleur

So far i've only found Carl Ruckert's memoir