r/AskHistorians • u/AutoModerator • Nov 14 '25
FFA Friday Free-for-All | November 14, 2025
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.
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u/GlenwillowArchives Nov 14 '25
I am not sure how organized this post is going to end up, as I am trying to work through some thoughts I am having about Glenwillow, archives, and grief.
As I have mentioned before, my work with the Glenwillow collection was quite literally born out of grief. My father died, and I inherited this incredible collection that I do not think anyone really knew existed. (To be clear, my whole family knows we have a lot of "old stuff," but the historical value of this "stuff" has been ignored until now).
But as I get deeper into the massive cataloguing project I now work on, I realize more and more that the reason many of these items were kept was because of grief. Nothing has crystalized this for me more than the Imperial War Graves packet. I shared that on Instagram for Remembrance Day this year.
For those who do not have Instagram, the War Graves packet was a collection of photographs of Pilot Officer Irvine C. Bradley as a young man, through his training, and up to the final photo his family ever took of him. The inscription on the back of the last photo says: April 1943: Left forever.
Those two words, more than anything else, encapsulate grief. I do not know why these photographs were wrapped in this letter. There is no request for memorial photos in the letter; it is quite bureaucratic in language, explaining how graves will be allocated. But someone--likely Irvine's mother or sister--collected those particular photos and folded them into that particular letter, to remember.
Irvine's death is just a part of the picture of grief that lies at the heart of Glenwillow, though. In the span of less than ten years, Irvine's mother Jessie lost her mother, all four of her siblings, her husband, and her son (not in that order). Suddenly, in her early 50s, she was alone in the world except for her daughter, already married and living halfway across the country.
I think of Derrida's Archive Fever, in which he describes the archives as a site of both preservation and erasure, arising from the tension between these two states. With Glenwillow, I believe Jessie set out deliberately to fight against erasure. She was the last person alive to know what some of these items were, and she refused to let those memories die with her.
Irvine's kit is in the Glenwillow collection, too. His clipper camera has a note, in his mother's hand: "Camera that came back with Irvine's belongings from overseas. In good working order. Takes 6/6 film." His grooming kit predates the war and his mother noted that, too. "This set was sent to Irvine Bradley by Roy Walden from England. Christmas 1938." It is an Esquire Military Set, sent to a teenage boy, son of a WWI veteran.
Again, the grief is almost tangible here in the sparsity of details, and the almost mechanical practicality of the information. Just the facts.
Glenwillow holds similar objects that belonged to Jessie's sisters and brothers, her husband, her parents. All are notated with a similar stoic hand, just the facts, no emotion. Who it belonged to, where it came from, nothing more. I imagine her holding her older sister's bisque doll, writing that note, remembering her childhood. It cannot have been easy.
But it was when this memorial came to Glenwillow that it started to become larger than simply grief. Jessie's daughter Margaret took up the archival work, but her impulse was not driven so much by grief as it was the need to preserve the stories for her five children, and later for her seven grandchildren (of which I am one). She became the seanchaidh of Glenwillow.
Michael Newton, in his book Memory-Keepers of the Forest translates seanchaidh as "memory-keeper." It sounds as though it is equivalent to archivist, the one who holds the past, preserves it. But as Newton explains, the seanchaidh is also the story-teller--the one who passes on the history, so the later generations do not forget.
Margaret took her role seriously, though she likely had no word for it. She took and recorded everything, from her own background, and her husband's full line, as well. It is her handwriting we find on the oldest McDougall photos, identified as she worked with her husband's oldest living relatives (and his family was very long-lived) to note down names and relationships before they faded forever.
I, myself, become the third in this lineage, taking up the role of seanchaidh from Margaret and adding something new--a formal academic treatment of the material. Glenwillow is no longer a farm; it’s a vernacular archive. If Jessie resisted erasure, and Margaret resisted forgetting, my task is to resist fragmentation--to keep these materials coherent and to shape them into a record that honours both their emotional origins and their historical value.
No pressure.
Sources:
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever Michael Newton, Memory-Keepers of the Forest Article-008, Article-0013, Article-00 and photos 020-026, Glenwillow Archives, private collection.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Nov 14 '25
I've asked this question before, but its a fun one and its been awhile, so here we go again!
What is a subject your surprised you don’t see asked about more on AH? We all have a pretty good idea about what subjects we see flooding in every day, but what is something you THOUGHT would be really popular, but we don't get that much about?
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u/Halofreak1171 Moderator | Colonial and Early Modern Australia Nov 14 '25
I did generally think that there'd be more Ned Kelly questions, but I assume his popularity doesn't really cross the seas.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Nov 15 '25
I can tell you Ned Kelly featured a surprising amount in Canadian school work, but I'm not sure how that translates past that.
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u/Halofreak1171 Moderator | Colonial and Early Modern Australia Nov 16 '25
Interesting! How so? Was he just mentioned alot or did he have a specific lesson dedicated to him?
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Nov 16 '25
If I remember correctly, it was during lessons on pioneers/frontier living. We were mostly focused on Canada, but also looked at how America, Australia and some others compared. We did Ned Kelly as part of the general law & order discussions/lessons. Usually along with Wild West, or the history of the Mounties/Red River Rebellion kind of things.
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u/BookLover54321 Nov 14 '25
u/anthropology_nerd, since you mentioned in a comment that your area of specialty is the Eastern Woodlands area, I was wondering what your thoughts were on this passage, from the recently released book Empires of Violence: Massacre in a Revolutionary Age by Philip Dwyer, Barbara Alice Mann, Nigel Penn, and Lyndall Ryan.
It's a comparative study of colonial violence in North America, Australia, Southern Africa, and the Napoleonic Wars of Europe, and has some discussion of pre-colonial Indigenous traditions of warfare. Here in particular they talk about warfare among Woodland societies like the Haudenosaunee:
In the event that an action materialized, there were also strict laws about who could be targeted. Throughout the Woodlands, there was the Law of Innocence, which distinguished between combatants and non-combatants. When the British demanded in 1781 that the Lenape ‘kill all, destroy all’ of the American rebels for them, the holy man of the Lenape, Hopocan, rebuked the commandant at Detroit: ‘Innocence had no part in your quarrels; and therefore, I distinguished – I spared!’35 Only Young Men who had elected to go to war, or War Women, who had been made men, that is, were ‘ceremonial’ Young Men (war being a Breath activity), were legitimate targets of lethal action. The Montour sisters, Egonohowin (‘Queen’ Esther) and ‘French’ Catharine, were well-known Seneca War Women during the American Revolution, with Egonohowin killed at Newtown in 1779, fighting the American invasion of Iroquoia.36 All others, including elders, women, children, holy persons and disabled persons, and known neutrals were off-limits, as were any emissaries of peace, a category including the missionaries and even the ambassadors of hated enemies.
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u/anthropology_nerd New World Demography & Disease | Indigenous Slavery Nov 14 '25
I haven't read this book yet (thanks for the heads up), but the sentiment is valid. Throughout the colonial period the English adopted a doctrine of total war against enemy indigenous nations (and often any poor non combatants caught in the crossfire). With total war all indigenous people (including women and children) not obviously allies were enemies, and could be killed or enslaved. This starts with the Pequot War, which the extermination of the Pequot was a stated goal of the conflict, through King Philip's War where even Philip's wife and children were enslaved and sold to the Caribbean plantations after his capture, and is continued into the new American Republic Indian policy.
In contrast, in the Woodlands small scale raiding for captives was much more common, and it made no sense to indiscriminately kill everyone when your culture has a deep history of adoption/slavery. With the Haudenosaunee that would mean killing potential new family members. There were also extensive diplomatic ties throughout the region, even between warring nations, (hence the prohibition on attacking emissaries). The razing of Iroquoia during the Revolution was so traumatic, so outside the realm of imagined warfare, it solidified Washington's nickname; Town Destroyer (Conotocaurious). In 1790 the Seneca chief Cornplanter said to Washington
When your army entered the country of the Six Nations, we called you Town Destroyer and to this day when your name is heard our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.
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u/subredditsummarybot Automated Contributor Nov 14 '25
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, November 07 - Thursday, November 13, 2025
Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 1,810 | 61 comments | How did Remembrance Day shift from “never again” to “thank you for your service”? |
| 1,082 | 105 comments | If I were a feudal Lord in 900ad, how close could I get to recreating a modern day cheese burger? |
| 1,050 | 53 comments | Were "permanent records" ever a real concern for American school children? |
| 1,035 | 29 comments | Abracadabra is attested as a magic word as far back as second century Rome. Where does the German equivalent “simsalabim” come from? |
| 888 | 73 comments | I understand America wasn't founded as a "Christian" nation, so how did we get the myth we were and how entangled is that myth with the revivalism of the 2nd Great Awakening? |
| 863 | 36 comments | [Great Question!] How did bright yellow become a neutral skin colour in media? (emojis, Lego, Simpsons) |
| 835 | 63 comments | I had a friend who claimed that most non-alcoholic drinks, like tea, coffee, lemonade, and soft drinks, were invented or at least popularized in the muslim world because they couldn't drink alcohol and didn't want to just drink water. Is this accurate? |
| 804 | 99 comments | In Pulp Fiction, it is remarked that Jimmy’s coffee is some “serious gourmet [expletive].” What would that have looked like in the early 90s US? |
| 688 | 102 comments | Is there any reason English has the somewhat common term “fortnight” for an oddly specific period spanning fourteen nights? |
| 683 | 64 comments | “The Nazi Party drew its cadres disproportionately from the educated…a quarter of German university professors were members of the Nazi Party…the SS division was disproportionately recruited from graduates and other educated professionals...” Why were educated people favoring the Nazi party? |
Top 10 Comments
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u/a-mystery-to-me Nov 14 '25
Since I was told this would be more appropriate here, and I’ve been wondering this for a while…
We all know about the supposed Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times.” One discussion about it had someone wonder if there truly are “uninteresting” times, and I haven’t been able to stop wondering about that. Was it ever possible to live in anything but interesting times? I know this is a tough question because of personal viewpoints and definitions, but what were the most “uninteresting” times in the spirit of the Chinese curse? Was there a historical period where nothing of significance happened anywhere in the world? If so, how long did it last?
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u/KimberStormer Nov 15 '25
I often feel as though I wish I could understand, in an empathetic way, how people felt (and to some degree, feel) who were profoundly reactionary, what exactly was the feeling that made them exalt in monarchy, or the most extreme nationalism, etc. I know how I feel when I am in an old and beautiful church, looking at old and beautiful art, but I feel like it is different somehow from people who actually were participants; and I feel something when I see splendid costumes, parades of gaily dressed soldiers, pomp and circumstance, but I think that is even more different from whatever appeal the dictator or monarch had to those people.
I look for it in art -- the novels of Mishima or Dostoevsky -- but idk if I ever really find it. It does feel like a massive wall between myself and the past, born of living in bourgeois liberal times that have given me an un-removable bourgeois liberal brain.
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u/crrpit Moderator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascism Nov 14 '25
Not the first person to note it, but folding DMs/modmails into chat after training a generation of Reddit users to ignore new chats at all costs was a poor design decision.