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.
I've been streaming historical games regularly for about the past month on Twitch (Ludohistory there), and recently I've been playing A Plague Tale: Innocence. While the main plot is medievalist nonsense, I've been incredibly impressed with how well, by and large, they translate the mentalities and anxieties of mid-14th century France into a game format! It's not perfect, but they put a lot of care into how horrible and oppressive simultaneous war and plague would be, and the various ways people attempt to cope with that terror. And it gave me a chance to look at the wonderful nonsense of actual medieval alchemy, which is fun!
I'm not even mad about the 7 quadrillion voracious rats! It's a wonderful visualization of this inevitable, unstoppable killing force that nothing you do protects you from, which... well, before 2020 happened, would not be an easy thing to understand, especially through a screen.
Mod told me to bring this question to here, so why not XD
if you had to recommend a single book for people wanting to know more about your area of research, which book would that be?
Today, we know how to recognize whether an artwork is Romanesque, Gothic, or Baroque depending on their features. My question is, which preceded which: the term for the architectural style or the features associated with it? For example, in the Gothic period, was there some sort of a guidebook or treatise which dictated painters and sculptures how to create their artwork? Or did we realize the common, unifying characteristics of the artwork in the 11th-13th century and then collectively tagged them as Gothic retroactively?
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, August 07 - Thursday, August 13
###Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 10,228 | 218 comments | [Meta] Not a question, just a “thank you.” |
| 7,013 | 87 comments | Nearly everyone in the Western world knows the name "Julius Caesar" and recognizes his life as seminal to many modern civilizations. Has this been the case for 2,000 years, or is it the product of 18th/19th century neoclassical Roman weebs? |
| 6,130 | 148 comments | Currently in the U.S., poor whites predominantly live in rural areas and poor blacks and poor Latinos predominantly live in inner cities. What historical factors and events led to this being the case? Has it always been this way? |
| 5,813 | 377 comments | [Meta] They were notorious of moderators of Reddit, surfing a tidal wave of [removed]. But behind the comment graveyard, the knowledgeable team was trapped in a private hell. The AskHistorians mods, as you’ve never seen them before... in my published paper. |
| 3,956 | 141 comments | Was Cleopatra's famously exaggerated beauty the work of her enemies? |
| 3,500 | 81 comments | Is there any evidence of “theme park” type attractions in ancient civilisations? |
| 3,259 | 105 comments | Why/when did minimum wage stop rising to match living costs? |
| 3,231 | 74 comments | When stores and restaurants had "whites only" out front or "no blacks" what would people who were neither do? |
| 3,138 | 84 comments | Why do so many English pubs follow the "The ___ Arms" naming convention? What does "Arms" signify in this context? |
| 3,044 | 68 comments | A lot of media portrayals of traditional Japanese culture (movies, shows, games, etc.) use a particular sound clip that sounds like a Japanese man saying "Yooooooooooooooooo". Is there are historical or cultural significance to that particular phrase? |
###Top 10 Comments
were there any historians (even fringe ones, but hopefully not hateful ones) in America that took Spengler seriously, but tried to finagle a separate organism/morphology for America out of his system, instead of keeping it entangled with the western/faustian one?
I've become fascinated by colorized video on YouTube; here's one Japan at the end of the last century. These appear to be benefitting from machine learning, but I'm not exactly sure how. Can anyone explain exactly what we're seeing in these videos?
It's a bit like time travel, and the perfect escape when hiding at home, from the heat and COVID. The clip notes that certain elements of the film are historically inaccurate. If that's the case, what does this visual experience represent? Is it a photographic record or more of a simulation based on algorithms tracing patterns in an old film?
Glad I happened to stumble upon this today. I was looking at old film posters from the 1910s-1930s, and all the men seem to be wearing blush. It’s hard to tell in photographs and films from the time because they’re in black and white and because of the quality, but did men wear blush back then?
I don't see the Shelby Foote trilogy on the recommend book list for askhistorians. Is it worth reading to learn more about the Civil War?
Any good YouTube channels dedicated to the history of warfare? I've developed a casual interest since playing total war