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.
Time to admit from the Reddit recap how many hours this year you’ve spent on the sub.
239 hours for myself.
Does anyone have a good resource for book reviews, preferably non-paywalled? There are so many history books published that it's hard for me to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Is there any chance we could have a flair for posts with non-deleted answers?
When reading on mobile the comment count often doesn't seem to update when a comment is deleted, meaning I might click to read a post with 10 comments, only to find they've all been deleted!
I feel it doesn't warrant a full question but I'm just looking for some good reads about WW1 and WW2 convoys with emphasis and/or detail on rescue tugs and rescue ships. Wikipedia only pretty much suggests a few Arnold Hague books which I have admittedly not read yet so any recommendations would be appreciated.
Doesn’t warrant its own post, but I thought I remembered a quote regarding nuclear weapons, and I can’t find it anywhere or anything that my memory could have mistaken for it. It goes: something something “in the hands of ethical children”.
The derogatory contrast between “ethical children” and whatever snappy epithet for the atomic bombs was in the first half stuck in my mind, but I might have misremembered it, because the closest I managed to find was J. D. Garcia’s “The Moral Society”. It has both nuclear war in its list of promised ends and a requirement for an ethical state to have “a critical mass of moral men and ethical children”, but I thought the quote to have been about the bomb specifically, so I’m not sure that’s it. Any ideas on what it might have been?
In the post-colonial world, has there been much effort to collect oral histories of the independence movements? I am thinking of India in particular but interested to hear about other places as well. I have seen that in the US there are efforts to collect immigrant oral history but I am more curious about efforts in India (or in another post colonial country) itself
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, December 02 - Thursday, December 08
###Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 3,205 | 120 comments | [Great Question!] How did the classical musicians 'drop' their music? How did anyone know, for example, when Beethoven was about to drop a banger? Was their an announcement? |
| 2,825 | 12 comments | My grandfather used to joke “You can sum up Russian history in five words: And Then It Got Worse.” How old is this joke, and the idea that Russia is a uniquely unfortunate country? |
| 2,150 | 42 comments | What was the deal with bullet bras in the 1950s? Why did they become a trend? Were they seen as scandalous or confusing or otherwise cause much backlash or cultural debate? Why did people want it to look like they had 2 traffic cones on their chest? |
| 2,132 | 38 comments | It's 112 AD, and I'm a middle class Roman citizen. Is it safe for me to travel to any part of the empire, or are there still cities/provinces that are inherently dangerous? |
| 2,088 | 112 comments | Does my grandmother "count" as a holocaust survivor? |
| 1,941 | 110 comments | Why is the Holodomor considered a genocide, but the Irish and Bengali famines are not? |
| 1,834 | 42 comments | Why was so much Christmas music created in the 1950s compared to other decades? |
| 1,698 | 24 comments | In 1926, César Vallejo wrote: "it will be worthless for man to go to the moon if profits aren't shared between workers and owners." Was going to the moon already in the air as something not utterly fantastical due rapid advances in flight? |
| 1,663 | 36 comments | Switzerland, Austria and Germany famously have "hidden champions" - small and mid-sized enterprises that are world leaders in their field but relatively obscure. Are there any goods reads on how they became so successful and history behind it? |
| 1,644 | 25 comments | Let's says we're in late 700s France and my job is to prepare a feast for Charlemagne. What does the prep and execution for a meal that grand look like with the food and tools I have available? |
###Top 10 Comments
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