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.
My paper proposal was accepted at my first Real Academic Conference! A much needed win after a very demoralizing PhD application process where I ended up waitlisted at my top choice and rejected elsewhere. This is a bad year for those of us trying to enter the historical field
Over in /r/wien, we had an excellent response to the question of why Vienna's public transport system is so good that's also well sourced (at least as an amateur I find it is).
I read Shattered Sword recently and now I can read all the Midway related answers here and go "hey I know where that's from!" Seriously good book, 10/10.
Also, the fact that the "Fall of Rome" wiki page leans heavily on Gibbons pisses me off - although there are a bunch of citations of the generally well regarded Ward-Perkins.
What are some important historical battles without any western countries participation?
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, March 12 - Thursday, March 18
###Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 7,612 | 104 comments | In The Great Gatsby, Tom reads white supremacist books and goes off on a racist tirade against interracial marriage. Nowadays we see this as proof he's a scumbag, but what would Fitzgerald's original audience have thought of it? |
| 7,338 | 169 comments | The first-ever Sherlock Holmes story, written in 1887, depicts Mormons as a terrifying, murderous cult that sets up a North Korea-like society in the middle of nowhere. Was this a typical view of Mormonism at the time? |
| 4,671 | 59 comments | How did the average European citizen in the 1490s react to the discovery of the Americas? |
| 4,606 | 93 comments | How were Soviet computers programmed? Did the Soviet Union have their own “communist programming languages” and a soviet ASCII? Did they create an alternative “Soviet FORTRAN/C/ASSEMBLY”? |
| 3,928 | 66 comments | So what was the popular reaction to the invention of sliced bread, anyway? |
| 3,596 | 29 comments | When and why did Congress start passing so much legislation through massive omnibus spending bills instead of stand-alone, issue-specific bills? |
| 2,994 | 92 comments | WW2: How much meth was actually consumed by the German army? |
| 2,499 | 47 comments | How did so many different countries come to converge on a higher education system that universally offered Master's degrees and PhDs? |
| 2,303 | 130 comments | Arab Muslims endured centuries of Ottoman, and later British, domination without prolonged and vitriolic conflict. Why, then, did Israel’s founding in 1948 provoke an immediate, frenzied, multinational invasion followed by decades of anger? What made that different? |
| 2,037 | 26 comments | [Women's History] Did the Mulakkaram (breast tax) ever exist and are the stories around it true? |
###Top 10 Comments
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I have little hope of getting an answer, but: U.S. historian Heather Cox Richardson identifies herself in her Twitter feed as "Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR)". Does anyone know what "TDPR" stands for?