Hello everyone,

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I used to be active on this sub years ago but I pretty much disappeared from social media for a variety of reasons. Recently I've been peeking more and more at Reddit and AskHistorians in particular. Hopefully, in a few months, I'll have time to be active again.

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Anyways, all this to just share my gratitude to this amazing corner of the Internet and to everyone who makes it awesome: the mods, the contributors, and the people who ask all these interesting questions. Keep going AH!

I have received two reviews of my manuscript, Monumental Lies: Early Nevada Folklore of the Wild West. Together, I believe these critiques represent the nicest I have ever had! No revisions necessary (although I am doing final edits); now I'm off to the editorial advisory board.

The following are a few paragraphs from my writer's response to the reviewers:

With thanks to my two kind readers, I must say that I can’t imagine the task of reviewing this manuscript. Monumental Lies is something of a unicorn, being unlike anything else. Frankly, I couldn’t even imagine writing the damn thing until 2021, over forty years after the moment I realized the topic needed to be addressed.

Until recently, I wasn’t equipped to tackle the subject: it is the closest thing I have written that approaches a 50/50 synthesis of folklore and history. Stretching my memory, I don’t remember anything I have read that fits that description. Historians often write about folklore, but they do not typically understand folklore methodology; folklorists often write about the past, but they do not adopt the perspective of the historian. Monumental Lies is the model I needed but couldn’t find.

I take my academic roots very seriously. I studied under a student of the Annales School of historiography. I was also intensively mentored in folklore’s Swedish Ecotype School, a variation of the Finnish Historic Geographical Method. Both the historical and folkloric approaches were early twentieth-century Positivist responses to the Neo-Kantians who dominated historiography and folklore studies of the century before. The inclination of the positivists was to deal “scientifically” with evidence of former times: in the case of the folklorists, the hope was to perceive a distant past by using the tendency of traditions to resist change.

The problem presented by early Nevada folklore was the way it constantly changed and had little to do with an earlier traditional legacy. While the disciplines of history and folklore provided essential tools to bring to bear on this topic, they seemed to offer little to inform me about how to address a subject that was new and fluid. I doubt I could have managed this task without writing my book, The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation (Exeter, 2018). The peculiarity of Cornish folklore was the way it was always in flux. Ancient roots had little to do with that body of tradition, and my Cornish wanderings helped me to understand what was needed for the Nevada topic I had yearned to comprehend.

Something snapped into place in 2021, and I was finally able to undertake this peculiar task. Before then, I could not write this manuscript, and I doubt I could have reviewed it, hence my declaration that this manuscript is a tough one to consider. If an earlier me were to write a review for this manuscript, it might have read: “I don’t understand this, but I think it should be published,” or “I think I understand it, and I think it should be published.” It is a unicorn.

Question for historians (social scientists are also welcome to answer): what kind of digital/IT tools would you like to have available to make your research better/more productive, or to be able to pursue innovative research projects?

I'm a historian myself, doing my PhD (modern History/History of international relations). I am also learning how to program and code, and I'd love to reconcile those two passions and develop tools, apps, etc for history and social science researchers.

I know "Digital History" is on the rise, but I'm not experienced in the field. If you are, or if you just have an idea of what might be useful for you or others, I'd really appreciate the input. Maybe I could create it someday...

Hi all. Just to let you all know that after 3 long years in development we have just released our History Timeline Exploration game ...History Sprockets in the Google Play store. You can explore, quiz, chat and strengthen your memory. History Sprockets

Are things built like they used to be? If I purchased a dresser in 1822 would it last as long as the typical dresser purchased in 2022?

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Were they German Retrievers or Alsatians first? Is there any records with one name before the other? Does it happen to have anything to do with Alsace-Lorraine, like my history teacher always theorised?