Historians, if you could convince the public to read one book about your particular era or field, What interesting book would it be and why?

RonUSMC · 4日前

I'm afraid I haven't had the chance to read it! It looks quite pertinent to debate, however, so I'll check it out.

RonUSMC · 4日前

It would likely be Dan Todman's The Great War: Myth and Memory (2005). This entertaining, accessible, and nevertheless rigorous book examines the contours of the war's popular memory and how it came to exist, taking a great deal of care along the way to puncture certain myths and smooth over certain inconsistencies. It is less combative and militarily-oriented than Gordon Corrigan's Mud, Blood and Poppycock or Gary Sheffield's Forgotten Victory, both of which have similar debunking missions in mind, and so far more likely to win over skeptical readers to its central thesis.

caffarelli · 4日前

Thanks for this. I'll be adding Intwilo to my list of things for which to look out.

Agent__Macklin · 4日前

Well, I'm not exactly ready to do it just yet -- a project for sometime in the summer, at least! Good to know it won't be a hassle for the team, anyway.

Agent__Macklin · 5日前

one of the mods is currently working on migrating it from its current flat-page form to a multi-tag searchable database.

Well now, that just sounds perfect. I've been meaning to (hugely) expand the WWI section for quite some time, but maybe I should wait until after this migration? My current plans would triple its size, at the very least.

ProudSocialist1922 · 5日前

You're very welcome! If you're interested in the various campaigns that achieved such amazing things during the First World War, additionally, I'd recommend David Monger's excellent Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain (2013) or Troy Paddock (ed.)'s World War I and Propaganda (2014), both of which offer excellent recent overviews of their particular subjects. Monger's in particular offers a great history of the National War Aims Committee and its various poster campaigns aimed at civilians.

For a broader view, the long-awaited second edition of Randal Marlin's Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion finally came out in 2013, and offers a solid book-length overview at the history and theory of propaganda in all its forms. It tends to lean very hard on the ideas of Jacques Ellul, another propaganda theorist of whom Marlin was once a student, but it's a decent and highly-accessible introduction to the subject.

AutoModerator · 5日前

Congratulations! May we ask what the paper was about?

AutoModerator · 5日前

I'll take this as a sign that it should be the next in my rotation of infrequent pleasure reading. Once Robert Conroy's 1920: America's Great War (2013) is out of the way, I will endeavour to secure a library copy of Martin Guerre.

caffarelli · 5日前

It is interesting that you make note of the similarity of peanuts to African groundnuts, because groundnut oil was part of this same economic boom.

Now this is interesting. Perhaps I've lived a sheltered life, but I don't think I've ever encountered these here in Canada commercially. Are they regularly imported for sale in North America, or has this crop sort of fallen by the wayside in comparison to the peanut in modern times? I'd love to try some, if I could.

ProudSocialist1922 · 5日前

In addition to the WWI poster campaigns linked to in the other reply to your comment, you might look into the trend of placards that persisted through (at least) the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries -- here's a rather famous British one from 1802, for example.

NMW · 5日前

Thanks! Nevertheless, I am indeed looking more for works that treat her specifically as a real person, even if only as a fictionalized version of herself -- that is, the "Victoria" who appears in the work could be doing wildly unusual things, but would still have to be recognizably and nominally Victoria.

NMW · 5日前

Yes, I'll be taking the question there and to /r/Literature when the next "American East Coast is Awake" cycle begins. This isn't the most important question to have answered, but I'm curious about it all the same! At least two of the works published about Elizabeth during her own life have been republican-infused fantasia that have seen her "become a real person" only after having been stripped of the crown or willfully abandoning it -- I doubt very much that Victoria, legendarily difficult to amuse, would have been pleased with anything like that in her own time.

AutoModerator · 5日前

We were just informed this afternoon that the introductory prose/poetry/drama classes that we have to teach to the undergraduates each year may now be officially advertised with themes we have chosen. Previously they had been kept deliberately broad and survey-like, in spite of the impossibility of such a thing in a 13-week class, but now we can develop syllabi based on any set of ideas or critical concerns we want and present them as choices for students who might actually choose them out of real interest!

In all, a happy day.

AutoModerator · 5日前

I've often wondered that as well. We have (or had, at least) someone who was flaired for "Medieval Ghost Stories", which I think has to be a strong contender.

tbone_21 · 8日前

I don't know about FIFA, but next week will see the beginning of the 2015 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa -- it's one of the biggest academic conferences in the country each year, and will be bringing many thousands of people to town.

NightVisionHawk · 12日前

Let's do this!

Oh, and of course:

RemindMe! 2 days Donation for /r/millionairemakers

coinsinmyrocket · 24日前

I can't wait (edit: absolutely can) to see who their next subject will be. Probably Mother Theresa, because why not

coinsinmyrocket · 24日前

Nevertheless, he still helped give those pygmies a damned good squashing.

shannondoah · 24日前

Let's just go all-out and declare him a Worshiper of Mahound.

coinsinmyrocket · 25日前

One other bonus bit that should be a red flag for anyone well read in the history of this era, is that early on in the video, the host also mentions how Lord Kitchener led the British Army at the outbreak of WWI. She then goes on to mention that he will be remembered for "bravely and gallantly upholding the British tradition of making his men walk slowly into the gunfire of the enemy."

My God. Kitchener was the Secretary of State for War, not "the leader of the British army." He made broad policy decisions, not minute tactical ones. It's like saying that Donald Rumsfeld led the American Army in Iraq, or that he determined platoon-level combat doctrine.

What bullshit is this?

AutoModerator · 27日前

Well, don't leave us hanging.

NMW

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