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.
Got extremely good news from the university-level promotion and tenure committee! Still a few more steps before it is finalized but we're nearly there...!
I found out today that I got accepted to be a presenter at a virtual conference in the spring! I'm going to be on a panel on how university faculty can utilize archives and institutional repositories in their research. The month before that I'm hosting a webinar about my university's archives. I should also find out whether I'm a finalist for a fellowship program I applied for around that time. The spring semester will be fun!
Are there any movies, series, tv shows (dramas not documentaries) involving -anything (remotely) related to the Norman conquest ... the Goodwinson families, harald, tostig, Harold, William, Edward the confessor, the Vikings, the normans the Anglo saxons in England etc.
I feel like that would play out very well and in my amateur research I haven’t found anything.
Occasionally people ask questions about history that are based on objectively untrue technical statements. These often go unanswered because there is no real historical answer to a question like “Planes today fly because they strap pigeons to the roof. When was this invented and why didn’t ancient Romans make planes since they had trained pigeons?”
Is there a good way for non-historians who have technical expertise correct a questioners basic premise?
I have been having a bunch of fun following /u/khowaga on @Tweetistorian on Twitter this week. They've been posting some fascinating threads on health and disease in Egypt. Always nice to get a close up look to a different part of the world.
I am not sure if this is the best place to ask this. I wanted a book recommendation about life of a historian which details how the person goes about charting out history of any specific era. I looked at the recommended books section on the FAQs but couldn't identify a relevant book. Any suggestions are welcome.
How did the experts seem to crack the code of the Mayans and the Aztecs ??? From the legendary stories ??? And how was it verified ??
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, December 11 - Thursday, December 17
###Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 7,691 | 170 comments | It's Mid-May 1945, I am a German Jew How do I get my house back? |
| 5,656 | 120 comments | Why is Patagonia so sparsely populated? |
| 4,398 | 90 comments | [Great Question!] Hanukkah, despite being a relatively minor Jewish holiday (indeed it is a festival, not a holy day), has, in the broader culture, become "Jewish Christmas," even though religiously it's not nearly as important as Christmas. |
| 4,229 | 63 comments | In the 16-1800's, Chinese demand for silver fueled a global trade that consumed much of the silver found in South America. Where is all that silver now? |
| 4,096 | 100 comments | Why did every communist country ban porn? |
| 3,019 | 63 comments | How Did Soldiers Handle the Noise of Combat During the World Wars? |
| 2,865 | 28 comments | Did Sigmund Freud's mother, Amalia Nathansohn Freud, ever comment on Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex? |
| 2,299 | 87 comments | Who had access to the Library of Alexandria? |
| 1,719 | 49 comments | When the Dutch created massive new land like the Flevoland polder, how were farms and plots of land assigned? |
| 1,094 | 9 comments | Lawrence Sheriff, who supplied groceries to Queen Elizabeth I, was apprenticed to a London grocer for seven years. What did grocers do in those days that required such long training? |
###Top 10 Comments
I'm tempted to read Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend, however due to being a remote arctic boi, I'm not going to be able to get it delivered easy. Anyone who has read it recommend it even as an audiobook?
does anyone know if susan b anthony has a known/traceable bloodline? it looks like neither she or her sister had offspring. not certain of this, or if they had any other siblings either though.
Who was the guy (I think he was french) who was demanding, before a U.N. assembly, for allied forces to withdraw immediately from Tora Bora in Afghanistan, back in late 2001 or in 2002, when it was believed that they had Osama Bin Laden surrounded? It was fierce fighting at the time.
Does anyone know about the use of masquerades in warfare? I can find two examples both of which are suspect, one is an uncited line on The Chichimec War's wiki saying that the Guachichil Chichimecs "would disguise themselves as grotesque animals useing animal heads and paint then yelled like crazed beasts making the Spanish lose control of horses and livestock." I can't find any source backing up their claim this after some googling (in English though). The second is the origin story of the Asaro Mudmen of PNG but this paper suggests that it's an invention from the 1950's for tourists. Does anyone know any actual examples or any detail about the Chichimec example?
The moderators on this sub are terrible. Whoever you are should be ashamed of yourselves.