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 posted this late to the last one, but my finals results came out last week and I utterly smashed them, so feeling very chuffed.
Here's a fun little thing: A short article I wrote for the British Journal for Military History was published this week. It's completely open access, so here's the direct link to it! It's part of the journal's "research notes" section that invites scholars to talk about new finds or debates within their research. Titled "Women as Turncoats: Searching for the Women among the Kit Carson Scouts during the Vietnam War, 1966-1973", my article concerns something that I have been curious about for a long time: Did women defectors from the PLAF and PAVN serve as Kit Carson Scouts? You will find the answer in the article, alongside other traces of women defectors, what happened to them after they defected, as well as some traces of the wives of the Kit Carson Scouts.
We have a Women's European History sub going on r/womeneuropeanhistory
It's been going 7 years and a recent surge in membership to over 2k means we've got some cult status !!!
And we wanted to ask people to X post over threads or indeed just post on the sub.
I got into it myself when I saw things missing in Irish history. It was an irish nun who invented battlefield triage. Irish nuns were hugely powerful and political.
Thanks to the mods for suggesting I post an invite here .
Could Tina Fey have called Charles Lindbergh on a cellphone?
I think it's possible.
I recently watched Chaplin's The Great Dictator and much like when I watched Babylon Berlin I found myself curious to read about that particular area of history which is so popular in questions here, and that makes me embarrassed to be interested. Wrote one question in the SASQ thread, but that's all. I turned to my art history books about Expressionism and New Objectivity etc instead, which is just as well, but it is strange how much pull of curiosity that particular subject can have, in spite of myself.
How do historians read primary sources ? How do they detect bias and the extent of it? Does a source become untrustworthy if it is highly biased?
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, July 16 - Thursday, July 22
###Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 8,282 | 285 comments | The Simpson family was supposed to represent the typical American family. Could someone with just a GED realistically support a 5 member family, a four bedroom house and two cars just with just one blue collar job in the late 80's early 90's? |
| 5,947 | 85 comments | There's a meme going around alleging that "There was a 22-year window in which a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln." I have multiple questions. |
| 5,293 | 95 comments | Would people have gone to the beach in medieval times? |
| 4,198 | 305 comments | How can I prove to my girlfriend’s dad the Holocaust existed? |
| 3,876 | 154 comments | Modern meat is full of preservatives and still spoils fairly quickly when left unrefrigerated. How did people in the old days have fresh meat in open air markets? Wouldn't flies alone ruin the meat within a few hours by laying eggs? Did people just eat spoiled meat regularly? |
| 3,338 | 75 comments | All over the world, it seems that all playgrounds have the same three staples: the swing, the slide and the see-saw. Has this always been the case? Where did they originate? |
| 2,780 | 57 comments | In 1796, Thomas Paine wrote in an open letter to George Washington that 'the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.' Why was Paine so angry with Washington? |
| 2,377 | 9 comments | In June 16, 1955, hundreds of civilians were killed in Buenos Aires by the Argentine Air force, in a failed coup attempt. Was there any international reaction to this massacre or was just considered an internal affair and ignored? |
| 2,158 | 49 comments | Was Homer's Odysseus a representation of a distant memory of the sea peoples? |
| 1,899 | 92 comments | How survivable was the frontline of a Medieval pitched battle? |
###Top 10 Comments
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I'm planning a trip to the Peloponnese in a month or so and would like to read a few books now and when I'm there about the history of the region. I'm having trouble finding books about the region and not the war specifically.
Any book recommendations?