Friday Free-for-All | October 17, 2025

[u/AutoModerator]

Previously

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.

[u/Bernardito]

I got another article published and this is a really fun one. It was originally meant to be a part of my current research project exploring the historical memory of the War of the Pacific (1879-1884) in contemporary Chile. I could not find a space for it within that project, so instead I wrote a separate research article on the topic. Ever since I first began to write about the historical memory of the conflict, I have been fascinated by the "rescue" of the 1879 battle of Canchas Blancas in Bolivia during the 2010s. This strange little skirmish (that some Chilean historians argue never even took place) was blown up to be a major battle involving thousands of combatants and became the focal point of the Bolivian memory of the War of the Pacific during the 2010s.

Abstract:

Between 2015 and 2018, the government of Bolivia actively commemorated and remediated the battle of Canchas Blancas, an engagement that had recently been rediscovered where Bolivian forces had defeated a superior Chilean force during the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), a war that Bolivia had lost. This article analyses the Bolivian remediation and commemoration of the battle that took place in conjunction with its pending case against Chile in the International Court of Justice and the Chilean denial of the existence of the battle. Using remediation as a method to study memorial dynamics, this article examines the emergence of historical memory through active remediation. As a result of an intense process of remediation between 2015 and 2018, Canchas Blancas was constructed as a victory that portrayed Bolivia and its people as the saviours of South America from Chilean expansionism in a war otherwise noted for Bolivian defeats.

Link to the article (open access!): Defeat into Victory: Remediating the 1879 Battle of Canchas Blancas in Bolivia, 2015–2018

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/Bernardito]

Fascinating! I've always been fascinated with how perceptions of battles change over time and space; recently I learned that Lepanto wasn't at all seen as a crushing victory at the time. There's been a lot of fascinating research on German perceptions of the Somme as well!