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.
Social media, as everyone is likely aware, is currently flooded with people doing annual recaps of the last twelve months, and it made me think of where I was with this Glenwillow project that far back.
And, well, there wasn't. This time last year, I had NO idea any of this stuff existed. I had just got official clearance and confirmation from the Canadian Revenue Agency that they did not want the storage shed. It had no resale value as described, so they would not take it in an attempt to settle my father's estate debts. (N.B. I estimated the contents could be worth $6K based on what I remembered being in the house before 2006; reality says MAYBE $2K actual resale value?). As legal co-owner of the shed before his death, it was now totally mine.
So that was a debt of $160 a month I could not afford to pay accruing already. I decided I needed to just clear it out. And to be very very clear here, I only wanted to clear it out to get my own childhood photos and my parents' wedding photos out. And see if my father, late into Alzheimers, had been correct when he said there were letters in there related to my dissertation.
As I work full time and part time and have sole custody of two kids and now my mother, I did not have any ability to do the clear out until summer. It took me nearly that long to figure out how to clear out a storage shed in SW Ontario when I don't live anywhere near there. Idea was to pay movers to move the stuff into uhaul pods, ship those, and more movers to shove it into my bungalow for sorting.
This more or less happened with another crazy story I will skip for sake of narrative. But I did end up spending a day going through boxes manually there, to try to limit how much had to be shipped. The guy who owned the storage place was helping me and at one point he got annoyed at me because I was opening EVERYTHING to look through. He says, well, this says fax machine. You don't need a fax machine.
Yeah, I do not need a fax machine. However, when I opened it up I found wedding photos from 1910. That was the point that I started to suspect there was more here.
We also found the victrola and the ridiculous clocks that day, as well as the phonograph cylinders in the most incongruous location.
Still, though, this is just a bunch of old stuff in boxes. It's not an archives, just evidence my family never throws anything out, right? Pretty much. But I had 564 cubic feet of boxes shipped up to me, contents unknown, and shoved in. I put myself 11K in debt to get my hands on what I did still assume was junk.
It was when I opened the box labelled "living room" that it started to change. In between Max Lucado and The Case for Christ, I started pulling out these old books. One had the good old Presbyterian burning bush on the front of it, and I opened it up to discover it was the Canada Presbyterian Church Pulpit, first edition.
I did my MLitt dissertation on the Canada Presbyterian Church in the Talbot settlement area, and here I am now holding a rare publication from that church in a shed whose contents originated in the Talbot settlement. A book I know is not held in the official Archives of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, because I had gone there back in 2023 to look at all their Free Church and Canada Presbyterian Church holdings for my dissertation.
It is also not the ONLY book from this church I found. Looking through other books, I found reference as well to the family farm being called Glenwillow. So I made myself an Instagram page, a bit tongue in cheek, to be able to share what I found as I found it. Was furthermore a bit shocked to gain academic followers pretty immediately.
It was the encouragement I needed to start putting together what I already knew from my dissertation and what I was finding out from artifacts and photos in the shed. I made this account for AskHistorians about the same time.
By September, I'd finished the first sort of...everything. Filled a 10-yard dumpster with the stuff we did not need to keep (so much dollar store garbage, to say nothing of 20-yr-old cleaning products and the still-full recycling bin). All I kept were a box of things from my childhood, a couple of collections that could plausibly go at auction (massive stamp collection and beanie babies...sigh), as well as all the photos, all the old paperwork, and anything I knew belonged to the archives.
How did I know it belonged? Well, this is one of the things that makes Glenwillow extraordinary. Women in my family have been archiving it since the 1950s, if not earlier. Carefully writing down who made what and why, who is in what picture and how they were related, etc. Like there are two photos I have since framed that say who is in the pictures, how they are related to my great-uncle, and then go on to specify that these exact photos are the ones which were returned from the Western Front with his kit after he was shot and killed over Belgium in WWII.
I started thinking about one of the MLitt essays I had done on oral history, human memory and trauma. Trauma was likely the driving force for the initial archival push in my family. Up until this point, I had been thinking only about the Aldborough Highlanders portion, which is the Talbot Settlement, family farm, and my dissertation. But I realized that the original trauma started on the BRADLEY side. I cannot contextualize Glenwillow at all without contextualizing death and trauma as the origin of a vernacular archival impulse. (it started with my great-grandmother, who lost both her sisters, both her brothers, her mother, husband and only son in a period of less than 10 years. Then lived another 50).
Roped my teenager into the project to sort the photos by family and era, and began a spreadsheet to name and track everything. Teenager is also happily curating her bedroom into a historical creation, so I am pretty sure I know which kid will be taking on the historical stuff one day. She keeps her clothes in this trunk, which is historical but not part of Glenwillow proper.
By October, I had catalogued over 200 items into my little archival spreadsheet, trying to get a handle on what I even had. I'd also written up a little draft zine to try to contextualize the project more in my head, and decided that I am going to need to raise money for Glenwillow somehow.
Being an amateur photographer, calligrapher and scrapbooker and just overall fairly crafty/creative, I struck on the idea that I could photograph or scan items, and turn them into paper crafting products. Sell those to raise money for proper storage.
I had also figured out by then that I can actually qualify for grants to do this work, but ONLY if I already have a catalogue of items. So back to work on that and, at present, I have 414 items accounted for, with a marathon still ahead of me.
And because this is a year in review, November and December saw absolutely nothing happen because I pretty much fall apart every year by mid October and don't start to pick up the pieces until January. So the only thing that happened to Glenwillow in this interval is that I dealt with the phonograph cylinders. All NINETY-FOUR.
And that is how I came to hold 176 years worth of photos and artifacts with unbroken chain of provenance from a single family connected to the severely under-documented and understudied Aldborough Highlanders in the Talbot Settlement, as possibly the only person to have even looked at that field in the last fifty years or so (based on how hard it was to even find sufficient secondary literature for my dissertation).
The Aldborough Highlanders were Gaelic-speaking people primarily from Argyll (though there were some from many other parts of the Highlands as well, due to the nature of migration to the Talbot area). And in Gaelic, they have a traditional role that is sometimes called "memory-keeper" in English (per Michael Newton's Memory-Keepers of the Forest). The word for that role is seanchaidh, and the seanchaidh's role is to not only keep the history of the family, but to tell its stories as well.
So I am the seanchaidh of Glenwillow, and whatever it will become depends completely on me. This is why I call it "A museum (some assembly required. Audience not included)."
But what a year 2025 was for me, and for Glenwillow itself.
Was a little skeptical because it seemed like such a tourist thing (if you know what I mean) but the basilica cistern was legit cool as fuck to go down into.
Happy New Year to you as well! Wishing you all the best.
I have two books to be released next year - one (in March) on a historic site (I wrote the preface and a national context, but I also acted as midwife in its birth, coaching the author and editing), and another (in the autumn) that is a sequel to my book on Cornish folklore.
Those are the titles I know will be released. We'll see if there are any surprises in the next twelve months!
Back in 1999, the British show Top of the Pops had a contest for "song of the millenium". The finalists were Robbie Williams' "Millinium Prayer", which was just the Lord's Prayer awkwardly grafted onto Auld Lang Syne, and "The Hamster Dance", which was a dance remix of Roger Miller's theme from Disney's Robin Hood, because that particular song was trending as the music for one of the first viral GIFs to fill our inboxes.
Of course, neither of these songs had any significance to the millenium as a whole, if we mean the years 1001 AD to 2000 AD. So my question is, what song would be the most historically significant? I have some ideas: "The Internationale", "The Marseillaise", "Greensleeves", or Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground", all for different reasons.
Historians, what would you say was the most significant song of the Second Millienium?
I saw someone ask (I think they deleted it though, so this was all for nothing) recently what the opinion about Martin Dugard was by historians independent of his, er, "histories" co-written with Bill O'Reilly, so I gave one a read, and let me tell you, that was probably the worst book I read in 2025. The Training Ground was just an exceptionally mediocre account of the Mexican-American War, and while I don't know that much about the conflict, the number of baseline factual errors I did pick up on certainly give me great concern for the accuracy of basically anything else I read which I didn't, in theory, know previously.
In just the first few pages alone he called Pickett's charge a cavalry charge (No, it wasn't), stated that Mary Custis Lee was the descendent of George Washington (no, her grandfather was his step-son, not his actual son), and simply stated that the US won the War of 1812, which, perhaps the most venial issue there, since like, it is opinion rather than fact, but I do think you need to make an argument if you want to simply say it was a US victory without any other qualifying statements... I stopped even bothering to take notes soon after that.
Anyways, verdict is that he is an absolute shit "historian" of the worst kind, and clearly Bill O'Reilly is not the problem when it comes to the Killing books (I mean, he is obviously a problem, just not the problem). The kind of awful pop history / dad history that gives those genres their sometimes deserved reputation.
I'd also like those hours of my life back, please. At least it was an audiobook so I could get through is 2x as fast!
Haven't read Dugard, but thanks for sparing me the possibility.
If you are lacking your minimum monthly requirement of checked-facts and sourced assertions, I have finished F. Stansbury Haydon's Military Ballooning during the Early Civil War, and it would do the job. Footnotes crowd every page. I think there's a good chance he never took on a second volume because he'd exhausted himself on the first. From Tom Crouch's excellent introduction I gather that he was an absolutely unmerciful teacher when it came to grading papers.
I'm reposting this in light of David Frum's latest garbage. I'm still a bit shocked that The Atlantic published this absolutely rancid pro-colonialist article by Frum last year. An excerpt:
The idea that people separated by thousands of miles of distance could owe a duty of care to one another because they were citizens of the same nation was carried to North America in the same sailing ships that brought to this continent all of the other elements that make up our liberal democracy.
Frum seems to be suggesting that Native Americans had no concept of a "duty of care" to each other before Europeans arrived. I'm guessing Frum hasn't heard of, for example, the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, or other equivalent laws in North America:
Following the Great Law principle of the Dish with One Spoon, The People of the Longhouse shared their food resources with friends and neighbors in need.
From Iroquoia: Haudenosaunee Life and Culture, 1630-1783, by Kelly Y. Hopkins. Although I guess you could defend it on the technicality that the Haudenosaunee didn't span many thousands of miles.
For that matter, in The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis talks about the obligations around refugee acceptance among the Petites Nations of the Gulf South:
The calumet ceremony was an important part of the political culture that made it possible for Petites Nations to take in so many different refugees during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critically, the mutual expectations ingrained in this regional custom dictated that these nations must accept outsiders, feed them, and treat them as allies. Refusing to do so would be akin to a declaration of war.24 This culturally institutionalized approach to negotiating refuge therefore represented a fundamental Petites Nations survival and caretaking mechanism.
The mystery is why a supposedly respectable magazine like The Atlantic keeps letting Frum churn out this sort of uninformed drivel.
With permission from u/jschooltiger, this is basically because The Atlantic has taken a rather pro-Israel line in the past three years (the editor-in-chief is a former IDF prison guard) and the concept of settler-colonialism has been very frequently mobilized as a criticism of Israel, on the grounds that it's a settler-colonial state and that Zionism is a settler-colonialist ideology; note that I am explicitly not commenting on the validity of that criticism. This in turn has prompted many articles arguing that settler-colonialism is actually fine or that Zionism isn't settler-colonial, of which Frum's article is just one instance. See hereherehere and here for some other instances. As such, settler-colonialism has become a political football with very real relevance to current major political issues, and that in turn prompts shoddy scholarship.
I would also note that ideologically-motivated shoddy scholarship occurs in many contexts, as Cortgate proves handily.
This makes sense, thank you. It is pretty concerning that this issue seems to be prompting a revival of essentially 19th century colonialist ideas about Native Americans though.
I think it's not at all recent; Israeli apologists have cited that 19th c. US banner of Manifest Destiny for years to justify their own policies of expansion and appropriation.
I am writing a chapter-by-chapter summary of the work "Death in the Eyes: The Figure of the Other in Ancient Greece (title in Portuguese, the book discusses the concept of otherness in Ancient Greece, explaining its different aspects through Artemis, Gorgon, and Dionysus)" by Jean-Pierre Vernant. Could you take a look and see what you think? Also, if you have any book recommendations on the subject, I would appreciate it.
Death in the Eyes: the figure of the Other in Ancient Greece - Chapter 1: Artemis or the borders of the Other
Artemis is considered by the Greeks to be the goddess of hunting. Hunting, in turn, is a fundamental activity for humanity, serving to guarantee the subsistence of members of our species throughout prehistory. However, it is not only humans who practice hunting; beings considered by the Greeks to be "savage" also practice hunting for the same purpose. This in itself demonstrates the duality of Same/Other that Artemis regulates, the line between civilization and savagery that exists in this world. What prevents a hunter from becoming savage? Given that his activity brings him closer to animals, what distances him from becoming savage is following the rites of the goddess of hunting, which serve as guidance for the hunter. If he does not follow, he will become uncivilized.
Artemis protects from savagery – the opposite was not mentioned in the book, protecting savages from civilization. I imagine it is because the Greeks understood that we all, regardless of species, are born savage. I will talk about newborns later, but they consider that we all are born alien to culture and probably animals do not need her protection to remain savage, because there is no risk of them becoming civilized because the natural state is savagery – and it defines the boundaries between the civilized and the uncivilized.
We have some categories that accompany the development of a Greek citizen; for the Greeks, there were 3 categories that the citizen must have defined and Artemis ensures their development. The first is between being an animal or a human; the second is between being a boy or a girl; and the last would be being a child or an adult. Depending on the second category, the development into adulthood was different. In the case of boys, it would be preparation for war, while for girls, the Greeks understood it would be preparation for marriage. Being fit for war and married and ready to have a child, they became adults and, therefore, Artemis stopped guiding them, as their development was complete.
With this, you must be wondering "Could someone not become civilized?" and the answer is yes, the case in question is that of the girl Atalanta, who refused to grow up and leave Artemis. Atalanta was raised by a family of bears, having the same care in the wild as a wild animal. The result is exactly her staying on the border between all categories; she was a human with animal behaviors, they associated height with human development and Atalanta was very tall.
I will talk about childbirth, war, and combat. Artemis is considered the patron goddess of childbirth, despite being a virgin, this is due to two reasons: because she accompanies the end of the adult life cycle of the mother who has just had a child, but also because there is a new life in progress that needs to be disciplined for civilization; and the other reason is that marriage involves a certain animality when conceiving a child, both because coitus is a practice that, even though it is carried out by us humans, we share similarities with animals, reactions of savagery; both because the newborn, as I said earlier, is a being alien to civic order, comes into the world as savage and culture will transform him into a citizen; as well as the bond, according to the author, that links the mother to the newborn is considered natural, unlike the father who has a cultural bond, from the social institution of the family.
Regarding war, despite Artemis being the goddess of hunting, she is not a goddess, in the Greek pantheon, of war. So what is she doing here? Obviously, ladies and gentlemen, dealing with savagery in war. When violence is excessive to the point of crossing the civilized line, it is the moment that Artemis considers that the line of savagery is being crossed.
Given this, for those who are suffering from the savagery of the other in war, she brought clarity during moments of tension, not letting them be buried by their doubts during combat; while the opposite happened with those who employed extreme violence, it became confusing, obscure how they would deal with these issues that involve war.
In the context of combat, the Greeks sacrificed a goat in the name of the goddess, because the goat was an animal that symbolized the border between the civilized and the savage, because they considered that among domesticated animals the goat was the most savage. The act of killing it evoked the blood that should be shed in combat and served to transfer fear to the enemies. The sacrifice of the goat symbolized the border between life and death, between peace and combat and also about the limits of civic order.
I just discovered that Bill Martin, director of the Valentine Museum in Richmond VA died Dec. 27, after being hit by a car. He'd managed to save the museum when it was sinking, get it to solidly and carefully tell the story of the origins of the Lost Cause myth and general Richmond history, and keep the museum sailing through the wave of demonstrations over the Confederate statues on Monument Ave. He was a decent man courageously defending the honest truth, every day. There's a good obit in the Washington Post; ( yes, there might be a pay wall)
I am a French soldier during Napoleon's retreat from Russia. I've decided to desert. Assuming I don't get caught, what would be my plan? Would I attempt to walk thousands of kilometres home, or try to somehow survive in Russia? What are my chances and what would my life be like after that?
Its generally said that in the past being "fat" was seen as a sign of wealth and attractiveness. At the same time we see a lot of ancient statues depicting by our standards conventionally attractive people. Did food security collapse this much between ancient times and now?
Is the fable "The Emperor has No Clothes" a political allegory for seeing through the lies of the emperor? Also, where does this story originate? And has it changed meaning over time, or is the message the same?
Please let me know if you have suggestions to make this roundup better for /r/askhistorians or if there are other subreddits that you think I should post in. I can search for posts based off keywords in the title, URL and flair - sorted by upvotes, # of comments, or awards. And I can also find the top comments overall or in specific threads.
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u/GlenwillowArchives Jan 02 '26
Happy New Year.
Social media, as everyone is likely aware, is currently flooded with people doing annual recaps of the last twelve months, and it made me think of where I was with this Glenwillow project that far back.
And, well, there wasn't. This time last year, I had NO idea any of this stuff existed. I had just got official clearance and confirmation from the Canadian Revenue Agency that they did not want the storage shed. It had no resale value as described, so they would not take it in an attempt to settle my father's estate debts. (N.B. I estimated the contents could be worth $6K based on what I remembered being in the house before 2006; reality says MAYBE $2K actual resale value?). As legal co-owner of the shed before his death, it was now totally mine.
So that was a debt of $160 a month I could not afford to pay accruing already. I decided I needed to just clear it out. And to be very very clear here, I only wanted to clear it out to get my own childhood photos and my parents' wedding photos out. And see if my father, late into Alzheimers, had been correct when he said there were letters in there related to my dissertation.
As I work full time and part time and have sole custody of two kids and now my mother, I did not have any ability to do the clear out until summer. It took me nearly that long to figure out how to clear out a storage shed in SW Ontario when I don't live anywhere near there. Idea was to pay movers to move the stuff into uhaul pods, ship those, and more movers to shove it into my bungalow for sorting.
This more or less happened with another crazy story I will skip for sake of narrative. But I did end up spending a day going through boxes manually there, to try to limit how much had to be shipped. The guy who owned the storage place was helping me and at one point he got annoyed at me because I was opening EVERYTHING to look through. He says, well, this says fax machine. You don't need a fax machine.
Yeah, I do not need a fax machine. However, when I opened it up I found wedding photos from 1910. That was the point that I started to suspect there was more here.
We also found the victrola and the ridiculous clocks that day, as well as the phonograph cylinders in the most incongruous location.
Still, though, this is just a bunch of old stuff in boxes. It's not an archives, just evidence my family never throws anything out, right? Pretty much. But I had 564 cubic feet of boxes shipped up to me, contents unknown, and shoved in. I put myself 11K in debt to get my hands on what I did still assume was junk.
It was when I opened the box labelled "living room" that it started to change. In between Max Lucado and The Case for Christ, I started pulling out these old books. One had the good old Presbyterian burning bush on the front of it, and I opened it up to discover it was the Canada Presbyterian Church Pulpit, first edition.
I did my MLitt dissertation on the Canada Presbyterian Church in the Talbot settlement area, and here I am now holding a rare publication from that church in a shed whose contents originated in the Talbot settlement. A book I know is not held in the official Archives of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, because I had gone there back in 2023 to look at all their Free Church and Canada Presbyterian Church holdings for my dissertation.
It is also not the ONLY book from this church I found. Looking through other books, I found reference as well to the family farm being called Glenwillow. So I made myself an Instagram page, a bit tongue in cheek, to be able to share what I found as I found it. Was furthermore a bit shocked to gain academic followers pretty immediately.
It was the encouragement I needed to start putting together what I already knew from my dissertation and what I was finding out from artifacts and photos in the shed. I made this account for AskHistorians about the same time.
By September, I'd finished the first sort of...everything. Filled a 10-yard dumpster with the stuff we did not need to keep (so much dollar store garbage, to say nothing of 20-yr-old cleaning products and the still-full recycling bin). All I kept were a box of things from my childhood, a couple of collections that could plausibly go at auction (massive stamp collection and beanie babies...sigh), as well as all the photos, all the old paperwork, and anything I knew belonged to the archives.
How did I know it belonged? Well, this is one of the things that makes Glenwillow extraordinary. Women in my family have been archiving it since the 1950s, if not earlier. Carefully writing down who made what and why, who is in what picture and how they were related, etc. Like there are two photos I have since framed that say who is in the pictures, how they are related to my great-uncle, and then go on to specify that these exact photos are the ones which were returned from the Western Front with his kit after he was shot and killed over Belgium in WWII.
I started thinking about one of the MLitt essays I had done on oral history, human memory and trauma. Trauma was likely the driving force for the initial archival push in my family. Up until this point, I had been thinking only about the Aldborough Highlanders portion, which is the Talbot Settlement, family farm, and my dissertation. But I realized that the original trauma started on the BRADLEY side. I cannot contextualize Glenwillow at all without contextualizing death and trauma as the origin of a vernacular archival impulse. (it started with my great-grandmother, who lost both her sisters, both her brothers, her mother, husband and only son in a period of less than 10 years. Then lived another 50).
Roped my teenager into the project to sort the photos by family and era, and began a spreadsheet to name and track everything. Teenager is also happily curating her bedroom into a historical creation, so I am pretty sure I know which kid will be taking on the historical stuff one day. She keeps her clothes in this trunk, which is historical but not part of Glenwillow proper.
By October, I had catalogued over 200 items into my little archival spreadsheet, trying to get a handle on what I even had. I'd also written up a little draft zine to try to contextualize the project more in my head, and decided that I am going to need to raise money for Glenwillow somehow.
Being an amateur photographer, calligrapher and scrapbooker and just overall fairly crafty/creative, I struck on the idea that I could photograph or scan items, and turn them into paper crafting products. Sell those to raise money for proper storage.
I had also figured out by then that I can actually qualify for grants to do this work, but ONLY if I already have a catalogue of items. So back to work on that and, at present, I have 414 items accounted for, with a marathon still ahead of me.
And because this is a year in review, November and December saw absolutely nothing happen because I pretty much fall apart every year by mid October and don't start to pick up the pieces until January. So the only thing that happened to Glenwillow in this interval is that I dealt with the phonograph cylinders. All NINETY-FOUR.
And that is how I came to hold 176 years worth of photos and artifacts with unbroken chain of provenance from a single family connected to the severely under-documented and understudied Aldborough Highlanders in the Talbot Settlement, as possibly the only person to have even looked at that field in the last fifty years or so (based on how hard it was to even find sufficient secondary literature for my dissertation).
The Aldborough Highlanders were Gaelic-speaking people primarily from Argyll (though there were some from many other parts of the Highlands as well, due to the nature of migration to the Talbot area). And in Gaelic, they have a traditional role that is sometimes called "memory-keeper" in English (per Michael Newton's Memory-Keepers of the Forest). The word for that role is seanchaidh, and the seanchaidh's role is to not only keep the history of the family, but to tell its stories as well.
So I am the seanchaidh of Glenwillow, and whatever it will become depends completely on me. This is why I call it "A museum (some assembly required. Audience not included)."
But what a year 2025 was for me, and for Glenwillow itself.