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.
It took 3 application cycles, including height of COVID when they slashed department funding, but I’m happy to say I accepted a fully funded PhD candidate offer from Kentucky. I’m glad that I went the MA route first, as it has fine tuned my research and writing skills, and I would not have gotten into a program without it.
I havn't commented on here in a good while, but I wanted to share a website I've built that I hope people on here (and others of course!) would appreciate: Historic Travel Destinations
The idea is to help people interested in history find Unesco World Heritage Sites near where they are along with some cursory historic information about the place. Say you're on a beach resort for a week and want to know more about the place you're at and perhaps make a trip.
I'm working on it continuously along with my daytime job - which is no longer history related - as a hobby project and will continue improving it. It would be fun if I could help encouraging people's history interest; even without having the time to set aside to look for posts and write extensive answers on here. :)
I finally got an article draft off my desk, only 22 months later than I initially planned! Now on to the things that are only a year behind schedule. And yet, somehow, I still dream I'll get the next book manuscript away by the end of next year? Wish me luck, gentle internet folk.
u/kmbl654, you nervous about your flair application too?
Normally I'd just let it pass, but I won't pass up a chance to talk about Best Carthaginian, so -
One thing that most laypeople tend not to know when the 'was Jesus real' question comes up is that we actually have better documentary evidence for Jesus than we have a lot of other figures of the time or before. Being an FAQ Finder, I have to deal with that since it pops up so often, so of course to keep myself from getting bored, I've started getting lippy when I do the rounds.
Which, of course, leads me to the man who is clearly Best Carthaginian: Gisgo. Wikipedia lists by name eight people going by that name, so we shall now clarify, this is Gisgo No.5 on Wikipedia's page. This Gisgo's claim to fame is that, at Cannae, while Hannibal was observing the Roman army marching towards them, Gisgo remarked that the size of the Roman army amazed him. Hannibal then replied, "Gisgo, another thing has escaped your notice which is more amazing still." Gisgo of course asked what it was, and Hannibal replied: "It is that fact that, in all this multitude, there is none who is called Gisgo." (Paraphrased from Perseus' copy of Parallel Lives.)
This qualifies Gisgo No.5 of Cannae not only to be Best Gisgo, but also Best Carthaginian, and also an excellent example of people with even worse documentary evidence than Jesus. To my knowledge, Gisgo is only attested in Plutarch's Parallel Lives, written at the beginning of the second century AD. Everything we know about Gisgo has been laid out in the previous paragraph.
Now, an Actual, Capital-H Historian could probably give you a longer musing about the nature of documentary evidence, and where the bar really lies in regards to whether someone did or did not exist based on the evidence pertaining to their existence. Unfortunately, I haven't got the proper training, so instead we get the above thoughts.
Tagging u/carmelos96, who asked me which Gisgo I was referring to, but answering it there would have been off-topic to the thread, so here it is in the Free-For-All, which really could use a bit more activity.
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, April 08 - Thursday, April 14
###Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 5,821 | 164 comments | In one Calvin and Hobbes comic, Calvin imagines he's a future archaeologist trying to discern the purpose of a wire hanger. He imagines it served a religious function or was used for eating. Is there an infamous example in your field of a similar mis-identification of an artifact? |
| 3,536 | 86 comments | The Mongols exterminated ~60 million people during their conquests, including 90% of the Iranian population (Hitler's Holocaust murdered 66% of European Jews, by comparison). Just how was the Mongol genocide machinery so effective in the absence of modern technology and bureaucracy? |
| 2,812 | 109 comments | I am having a baby next week and I was just reflecting on how women in the past might have felt in the lead up to birth knowing that there was quite a chance they could die. Are there any first hand accounts I could read? Anyone know more about this subject? Thanks. |
| 2,299 | 34 comments | Blackbeard's ship was famously called "The Queen Anne's Revenge". But who was Queen Anne and why would she need revenge ? |
| 2,298 | 35 comments | How extensive was the purposeful destruction of foodstuffs during the Great Depression? Steinbeck paints a very severe picture. |
| 2,102 | 19 comments | Did the Nazis originally plan for Hitler to be followed by additional Fuhrers? |
| 1,925 | 47 comments | I could imagine the first generation of children born on Mars resenting their parents for not bringing them up on Earth. Do we know how historically colonists' children felt in this regard? |
| 1,605 | 31 comments | [Christianity] In Philippians the apostle Paul sends letters to Christian congregations while imprisoned in Rome. Was it normal for romans to allow prisoners to send letters? Did Rome have a postal service? |
| 1,491 | 62 comments | When a Roman emperor or European king would mint new coins with his portrait (or whatever) on them, did they take the old ones of previous rulers out of circulation? Or would citizens be faced with a myriad of coins with different faces of different people? |
| 1,274 | 17 comments | Bosnia is almost landlocked, but it has a narrow, 12-mile long piece of land on the Adriatic Sea. How did it get this sliver, and how has it kept it, despite it cutting off a piece of Croatia? Why isn't the strip built up as an industrial port for Bosnia? |
###Top 10 Comments
If you would like this roundup sent to your reddit inbox every week send me a message with the subject 'askhistorians'. Or if you want a daily roundup, use the subject 'askhistorians daily'. Or send me a chat with either askhistorians or askhistorians daily.
####Please let me know if you have suggestions to make this roundup better for /r/askhistorians or if there are other subreddits that you think I should post in. I can search for posts based off keywords in the title, URL and flair. And I can also find the top comments overall or in specific threads.
How is Lindsay Graham (the UC Berkeley historian, NOT the senator) perceived within the field? I'm enjoying his podcasts, but if he's known for sloppy methodology, undue bias, or stretching facts to fit a narrative, I want to know. Google isn't much help, because it's hopelessly swamped with countless people misspelling the senator's name. Can anyone offer any insight?
Does anyone have a book recommendation about Red Vienna in english?