I almost posted this as a separate thread earlier in the week, but wasn't sure it was worthy, so waited until the weekly Friday thread.

So, r/AskHistorians is great, but is it ever appropriate, or ok, to ask the historian?

I remember writing my bachelor's thesis (this would have been 2002) and during a weekly progress report meeting with my advisor I had expressed some frustration with readings just brushing the surface of a particular topic and not being able to get further when I tried to jump into a footnote rabbit hole. One of her suggestions was to simply look up the author's contact information and send an email asking if they'd be willing to give further reading/guidance - after all, she said, these are public figures (at least in the sense that the vast majority of them are associated with a university history department) with contact information publicly available through their university websites and she wished it were an avenue she had available to her when she was a student.

Of course, my shy 20-year old brain couldn't fathom that a respected academic at a place like Duke would care about somebody like me at Podunk State - besides, what if they thought I was just a lazy student looking for homework help? I'd be mortified.

This memory recently came up in conversation with my wife - an academic, albeit in a hard science - who thought she'd be thrilled that a layperson had engaged with her work. What say other academics? Is it ever appropriate to reach out to an author with questions on their work or to ask for further guidance/reading? Would you think the questioner was a presumptuous jerk for being so bold? Would you find pleasure in the fact that your work is of interest to someone outside of academia? Would such an inquiry just get buried in your inbox and forgotten about before you have a chance to respond?

I realize that there are likely as many answers to this question as there are people who have written books/articles but, especially when the question is niche and isn't easily accessed by the layperson, I'm wondering if the advice of my advisor twenty years ago holds any weight. What would be the etiquette for posing a question to SmartHistoryPerson@university.edu?

All I have to say is that I aced my finals, but I will keep saying it at every opportunity until it gets old.

I asked this as a stand alone question earlier but didn't get an answer so here goes:

At the end of the Second Opium war the Qing arrested and tortured a British truce party, which was used as a justification for the destruction of the Summer Palace. Though they must not have expected such an extreme outcome, why did the Qing decide to detain this truce party? What good could possibly have come of it?

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I have a meta question:

Can a top-level response to a question be used to ask the OP for clarification? I see a lot of questions that are either poorly phrased or framed, which can lead to ambiguity. I want the questioner to receive a proper answer, especially if I feel I can provide one because the subject is within my speciality. But at the same time, I don't see the point of composing an in-depth response based upon a misinterpretation of the original question. And my understanding is a top-level response that doesn't attempt to provide an answer will be deleted.

If I was teaching a course or meeting one-on-one with a student, I could ask for such clarification on the spot before proceeding with an attempt to answer the question. But due to the Reddit format, that's not possible--unless, I suppose, PMs are exchanged.

What's the rule in this sub for clarifying confusing or ambiguous questions? Are we expected just to ignore them?

Thoughts on how to vet an interesting looking history book as a non-historian browsing used bookstores/anywhere? I don’t love picking up a book that seems cool, reading it, then realizing it was bad or sketch research/author was a charlatan/etc. bonus for non-google-it resources since a lot of used bookshops I go to seem to prohibit excess phone use for reasons I respect.

I've been watching the documentary The Battle for Chile, a fascinating collection of footage as the South American country slipped into military dictatorship in 1973.

Two questions:

1. Does anyone know how they got this footage? There are parts where you're watching not just street protests but deliberations between politicians, and I think it's amazing they got this kind of access.

2. The film is both documentary and openly propagandistic. Can anyone recommend some even-handed histories of the Allenda period? Allende is of course valorized by the left, and it's hard to get a read on what was taking place and how much history is being fileted through socialist bias.

What's the academic community's general opinion on the book A History of God by Karen Armstrong? So far i've enjoyed it immensely but there are things i can imagine a historian potentially taking issue with. For example in the first section she paints all pre-abrahamic, polytheistic religions with the same brush, claiming that because they allowed for the belief of many gods they were not dismissive of the religions of other communities which she contrasted with the insularity of the jews as an explanation for why they ostracized. I'm a complete layman so I have no idea how true that statement is.

(I have no background in any relevant field.) There’s definitely a ton of evidence that industrialization leads to deforestation, at least under common conditions. (And there are probably some ways that industrialization reduces deforestation.)

But I’m wondering whether there are any prominent scholarly arguments that deforestation contributed to industrialization, especially in Britain.

The reason that this occurred to me is the following:

1. I think I’ve read in various places that Britain was an outlier in terms of deforestation in the early modern period. I remember not being sure about the evidence I was looking at, since different bits of forest have different kinds of possible human uses.

2. I’ve definitely read in various places that Britain’s early start on its modern phase of industrialization could be partially explained by “relative factor prices,” in particular

a. Availability of cheap coal

b. Availability of cheap labor of certain types (children, women, dispossessed farmers to work in early factories and other “intensely managed” production situations)

c. Scarcity of cheap labor of certain types (thinking of Robert Allen’s arguments based on reconstructed wage data).

If #1 is accurate, then I was wondering whether anyone has added a part d (“scarcity of cheap wood”) to #2.

Does anyone know anything about an Animator's Union strike in the US back in the early 80s? Apparently all animation was outsourced to other countries.

What in the world is up with the obsessive anti Woodrow Wilson stuff recently? First off - I get that he was horribly racist, even for his time he had really regressive views. That being said, I'm not really much of an expert on the period or him specifically, but I had never gotten the impression he was considered a terrible president.