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.
Recently read Auerbach's Mimesis and I have been thinking about reading. Why do I read? I read strictly for pleasure. History as much as anything else. "A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check his desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading," says Virginia Woolf. I don't read to learn, I don't read for moral instruction, I don't read for social improvement or whatever. And the pleasure I get from history is the pleasure of strangeness, of confronting minds who did not think the way I think, the way "we" think today, and trying to understand their thinking in a sort of physical way, to look out through their eyes instead of my own. Accordingly I always have a bias in favor of the historian who says "people of the past were profoundly different" instead of the one who says "people of all times are essentially the same". It is always disappointing to hear something like Moses Finley's Ancient Economy (which I have not read yet, but understand to argue that the "economy" of the past was utterly unrecognizable by modern understanding) has been refuted or is unfashionable or whatever. I always want to read something that bends and frustrates my mind, rather than fits into the neat slots existing in it already. I want to believe that any time we try to reason out the events of the past by "logic", make up our just-so stories where "it makes sense if you consider blah-blah-blah" in 2005 blog-post/pop-history style, we are always wrong: "The result of historical study is precisely the demonstration of the fallacy of our arm-chair logic -- the proof of the poverty of this kind of speculation when compared to the surprise of what actually did take place," as Herbert Butterfield wrote in his Whig Interpretation of History. I read especially for that surprise.
I don't want to think that religion was a conspiratorial scam of elites to keep the people ignorant and docile, of course, but neither do I want to read that "people in the past believed in their religion", I want to read that "religion" did not exist as a category of thought, because the "secular" did not exist either, because that's far more sideways and difficult to wrap my mind around. I always appreciate answers here which bend my mind, and it happens so often, on so many topics -- who would have thought I would feel that way about the colonial militia? yet u/PartyMoses' answers on that topic certainly have done it. I love when a word for a topic in the past turns out to be a false friend in the linguistic sense, that we use the same word now, but the meaning is different, so we popularly misunderstand things, particularly taken out of context, like Bible verses. (Though I feel that I myself am becoming one of those -- what I mean by "I read for pleasure" doesn't mean I read strictly genre fiction and what I mean by "Whig history" doesn't mean exclusively, or even predominantly, teleological thinking)
It is the great pleasure of not being a historian that I don't have to correct my bias, that I am not hurting anyone when I prefer the uncannily strange interpretation to the mundane and modern-feeling one. Anyway if anyone has read this far and has any suggestions for books that scratch this itch, do let me know.
Started a Masters outside of history which means I’ve less time to read history, but I’ve been inspired to do a part-time Diploma in history after it and possibly another Masters.
It’s disappointing though that I won’t have time to try answer questions or find answers to my own questions for the next year.
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, September 16 - Thursday, September 22
###Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 4,250 | 94 comments | How many men died DIGGING the trenches in ww1? In modern construction, trenching is one of the most deadly tasks, requiring shoring or trench walls. |
| 3,553 | 140 comments | [Great Question!] How did the computer game Oregon Trail become ubiquitous in US schools during the 80s? |
| 3,547 | 83 comments | will someone please help identify and provide context on my polish grandmother’s papers from when she was sent by father to work at a nazi camp? |
| 3,078 | 111 comments | Ancient Rome offered its conquered subjects a "good deal": We'll give you ports, roads, sewers, aqueducts, hook you into our wealth-building global trade network, and defend you. All we ask is that you say a prayer for our emperor once in awhile and pay your taxes. How onerous was that tax burden? |
| 2,683 | 11 comments | I've recently learned that most 'dungeons' I've seen while visiting castles in my homeland Spain were actually water deposits decorated with fake racks. When did the obsession with imagined dungeons start and why? And did castles have real dungeons at all? |
| 2,279 | 102 comments | How in shape were most knights generally; and what was their “workout” like? |
| 2,160 | 183 comments | [AMA] I’m Dr. Christian Raffensperger, author of Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World, and I’m here to talk about medieval eastern Europe and, if you’re interested, the medieval factors in the war in Ukraine. AMA! |
| 2,043 | 27 comments | [Whaling, Fishing & The Sea] 2021 saw an unexpected wave of sea shanty revivalism, but how popular were songs like 'Wellerman', 'Old Maui', and other sea songs and shanties in practice among Whaling and other vessels? |
| 1,711 | 44 comments | The cannons at Edinburgh Castle have what appears to be a dollar sign on one side of the pivot. Does anyone know what this indicates? I assume this symbol predates the US dollar, since the cannons likely do as well. |
| 1,643 | 42 comments | Why was an old boot the stereotypical “rubbish” that you fished up when you had a bad day of fishing? Were there a plethora of people throwing their boots into rivers at the time? |
###Top 10 Comments
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Who are some people in history who were arrogant but could walk the talk? (Some say Napoleon wanted to be God, but at least he backed it up with his military wins. Any other people who walked the talk?)
Does anyone specialise in British History such as King Arthur?
Irish people didn’t just eat potatoes. Indian people knew how to dry lentils for a long long time. How about some explanations about the “famines” in the 1800s and prior.