#historian problems

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

Some of my favorite historians, writing about their favorite Romans

Arthur Keaveney: Sulla isn't evil he's just misunderstood. Well maybe he's a little evil. But not, like, evil evil.

Celia Schultz: Fulvia 👏 deserved 👏 better

Robert Morstein-Marx: I will move heaven and earth to correct misconceptions about Julius Caesar but I am not reading The Gallic Wars again.

Marilyn Skinner: Clodia deserved better!

Lindsay Powell: Marcus Agrippa was the coolest Roman ever and I am not taking questions at this time.

Fred Drogula: Cato. Cato what are you doing. Cato NO

Suetonius: My cousin's roommate's babysitter told me that Augustus' dad was a snake and one of Caesar's trumpets was stolen by a ghost.

[dearearlyarchaeologists]

Dear early archeologists,

If you ever forget to record not just the contents of but every level in the tomb you emptied,

1. Apologize

2. Quit your job

3. Cry into your pillow

Please do not -

1. Freak out

2. Make everything up

3. Send it all to a historian so that a group of undergrads five decades later can prove you an imbecile

[cursedgamerchild]

"internet historian's alt-right anyways" "great day to have never liked james somerton" "never even heard of illuminaughtii before this lol"

that's great buddy but don't go around thinking you're immune to this. if you're not looking for plagiarism, you likely won't notice it unless its egregiously obvious. hell, you've probably consumed plagiarized content without even realizing it. even hbomb pointed out that these people disguised what they presented pretty well as long as you didn't try and dig deeper. don't come away just thinking of this as a callout piece, take this as an important lesson about vetting your sources. if googling scripts in quotes was enough to expose the original, we should all start doing that shit!!

edit: it got a little too doomer-y a little too fast so one quick addition

this is hbomb's curated playlist of queer creators, many of whom were victims of plagiarism

this is producer kat on reddit calling for any more plagiarism discoveries and for queer content creators to be uplifted

please take some time to uplift these creators and recommend any you know! if you can help uncover more of the original creators whose work was lifted that would be great too :)

UPDATE- From Hbomb's twitter: "We're in the process of cataloguing everyone James Somerton plagiarised and finding their contact information. Which is quite a task, so to help us out: If you see this and happen to be one of the people Somerton stole from, please email us at contact@hbomb.zone"

edit 2:

[ezratheunready]

There should be an app or something that can translate German gothic type face because I can’t read that shit at all. It doesn’t even look like words. 

is my German reading ability great, or even good? absolutely not but I can’t even tell which letter is which and now I want to melt my face off. 

[ochipi]

What nobody tells you about archaeology

Dear tumblr people. Archaeology sounds like it’s the most exiting job on the planet. And while I think that’s true for me personally, let us not think Indiana Jones and promises during job interviews or what your professors will try to convince you of. If you want to keep living in dreams, don’t read further (I’m sorry)

You’ll get a new sense of hygiene. Eating with dirty hands? Sure. Clean nails? On what planet even? What you mean my car is dirty? Grocery shopping covering in mud? It’s just soil. Nothing disgusting about it. Sand throughout your house? Just part of the life as an archaeologist

The stereotype says that people ask about dinosaurs, but all they truly want to hear from you is the words “gold” and “treasure”. And you can answer jokingly about two times and than you will be absolutely done with the dumbness of the public

There are a lot of women in archaeology and we do the same manual labor a man does. But construction site workers and the public sometimes too will question your abilities. A woman in a digger is like a theatre show. Women wearing working gear clothes is weird. People will be (overly) worried. Sometimes to the point the public is relieved when you say you’re an archaeologist. Not that they would know if it’s better or not. But is sounds better than sewer pipe cleaner or construction worker or demolition worker. Like hey. We do medieval sewage systems. Respect other peoples jobs please.

I graduated under the promising words that archaeology is a science and you make the world better with your research results and you need to do a good job because you can only do it once or it will be gone forever. No. Archaeology is subject to politics and economics more than the academic world. You are part of a company that has to make money in the end of the day. Everything can be turned into the most ideal outcome for your client or your boss as well. Things can and will be faked. And laws and heritage services are just plain shit

You work terrible hours of manual labor for a very low paycheck. Most work at private companies, they have competition, they have to go cheaper than the other one. And you will suffer for it. Either personally or by the materials you work with i.e. everything is broken and will never be replaced

You will always be subject of impossible expectations. Be it by your boss, the client, the landowner or the heritage department. They are all people with no idea how or why we do what we do. And it sucks. It’s like talking to a brick wall. They will not bend, they can only crack (their ego’s).

[finnlongman]

I love how discussion of "medieval" fantasy novels had me half convinced the divine right of kings was a medieval concept even though I've never come across it in medieval literature, and then I start doing some actual research and discover we can blame that one on James I and the seventeenth century.

Edited to add: I turned off reblogs for a reason, lads. I realise there's a lot more nuance to the history of this phrase than I conveyed here and that versions of this concept have existed in different places. I was talking about a very specific manifestation of it in a very specific (English) context, in terms of how it gets used in popular understandings of the past – nothing else, and purely as a curiosity for myself, not a history lesson or discussion starter. If I could also turn off replies on this post, I would do so. Please stop telling me about the use of the concept elsewhere and during other periods, I am a) aware and b) not actually interested at this time. I have made that abundantly clear in my comments on the post.

[0sbrain]

some people need to SERIOUSLY reconsider how they engage with media.

if you don't try making the bare minimum level of engagement with whatever media you watch, you don't get to complain and be surprised when the people you trusted to do the analysis for you didn't bother to do it either.

[clove-pinks]

Here's what you are in Marryat's code of signals! Happy Valentine's Day, friend!

Thank you my friend!! ❤️

In the 1847 (tenth) edition of Marryat's Code of Signals, I believe I found your intended message:

HOWEVER. The first thing I pulled up was the fourth edition of 1826, which has a distinctly different message for 943:

Hopefully no one would be sailing around in 1847 with an edition of Marryat's Code over 20 years out of date, but this could set up some pretty catastrophic misunderstandings...

"Update your software code book! OR ELSE."

[thousand-sunnies]

every day the collection of fics i want to write grows bigger

[rahabs]

The Tudors ran so Wulf Hall could shuffle awkwardly around reiterating the same tired old Tudor stereotypes while claiming to be something new.

[dullahandyke]

like maybe im an idiot but imo queerness being trendy to the point that some allocishet ppl r pretending to be queer to join in (and maybe finding out theyre queer while theyre there) is a good thing

[the-busy-ghost]

Alright uninformed rant time. It kind of bugs me that, when studying the Middle Ages, specifically in western Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a pre-requisite that you have to take some kind of “Basics of Mediaeval Catholic Doctrine in Everyday Practise” class. 

Obviously you can’t cover everything- we don’t necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of obscure theological arguments (just as your average mediaeval churchgoer probably didn’t need to), or the inner workings of the Great Schism(s), nor how apparently simple theological disputes could be influenced by political and social factors, and of course the Official Line From The Vatican has changed over the centuries (which is why I’ve seen even modern Catholics getting mixed up about something that happened eight centuries ago). And naturally there are going to be misconceptions no matter how much you try to clarify things for people, and regional/class/temporal variations on how people’s actual everyday beliefs were influenced by the church’s rules. 

But it would help if historians studying the Middle Ages, especially western Christendom, were all given a broadly similar training in a) what the official doctrine was at various points on certain important issues and b) how this might translate to what the average layman believed. Because it feels like you’re supposed to pick that up as you go along and even where there are books on the subject they’re not always entirely reliable either (for example, people citing books about how things worked specifically in England to apply to the whole of Europe) and you can’t ask a book a question if you’re confused about any particular point. 

I mean I don’t expect to be spoonfed but somehow I don’t think that I’m supposed to accumulate a half-assed religious education from, say, a 15th century nobleman who was probably more interested in translating chivalric romances and rebelling against the Crown than religion; an angry 16th century Protestant; a 12th century nun from some forgotten valley in the Alps; some footnotes spread out over half a dozen modern political histories of Scotland; and an episode of ‘In Our Time’ from 2009. 

But equally if you’re not a specialist in church history or theology, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to probe the murky depths of every minor theological point ever, and once you’ve started where does it end? 

Anyway this entirely uninformed rant brought to you by my encounter with a sixteenth century bishop who was supposedly writing a completely orthodox book to re-evangelise his flock and tempt them away from Protestantism, but who described the baptismal rite in a way that sounds decidedly sketchy, if not heretical. And rather than being able to engage with the text properly and get what I needed from it, I was instead left sitting there like:

And frankly I didn’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole that would inevitably open up if I tried to find out

[heartofstanding]

The more I think about the insistence on Henry IV's beardy manliness by certain historian(s), the more I cling to the idea of Henry as horribly repressed and deeply insecure, particularly in regards to his masculinity, even as he appears to live up to chivalric ideals, and the idea that his repression also heavily incorporates queer desire(s).

[deanu]

I'm not sure how well the netflix adaption of The Three Body Problem is going to explain historical context

So if you give it a watch I recommend reading up on Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward and China's cultural revolution if you're unfamiliar China's Communist history

The very, very short tldr (that doesn't do the history justice, but if you're gonna read anything it may as well be this) is that once the nationalist party was defeated and the chinese communist party took over in 1949, Mao decided to displace agriculture workers in favor of industrial steel work (Great Leap Forward, 1958) and start a child occupied military group (Red Guards, 1966) to wage a war on education.

So, many people starved and were killed for being deemed intelligent during his time in office. Mao's leadership may have ended with his death in 1976 but the impact of it is still felt in China today.

[weedle-testaburger]

the most weirdly satisfying thing is when a youtuber you like dunks on a youtuber you hate for being full of shit

[chicago-geniza]

It would be sooo funny if I applied to the University of Warsaw to do a PhD po polsku with Anna Nasiłowska but since Anna Pilch died and I'm not focusing on film like the Małgorzatas she is in many ways literally the only person qualified to supervise my Fake Thesis on Stefania & assimilation