#historian problems

[lanfykins]

Aaron Burr's borrowing record at the New York Society Library fascinates me.

Initially, that it was so punctuated; he didn't visit the place for like ten years, then spent most of the second half of 1801 taking out book after book. Why?*

But then I looked closer, and he was also supposedly borrowing books during the winter of 1791 when we know he was living in Philadelphia. Given that we have letters from him to Theodosia on the 13th and 15th of December, it seems unlikely that he was in the library borrowing An Universal History... vol 42 on the 14th.

One wonders, therefore, whether some of Burr's borrowing history is actually that of family members who could legitimately have borrowed under his name?

* Having had a bit more of a browse around, all of the Founding Fathers' records show the same big gap there. So that seems likely to be a break in the records or a change in the library rather than indicating anything about Burr in particular.

[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

[acrossthewavesoftime]

Just Historian Things: ...When you're watching Beforeigners, and discover you have a decent understanding of the unsubtitled bits when the vikings are talking.

Now I know why I learned Old Norse.

[jamesdeniscouldnever]

The actual face I make when anyone at all ever claims to be a "direct descendant" of Abraham Lincoln. Claim to be his many-a-great grandchild but don't know enough about him to know his family ended with Robert.

[shortace]

Historian problems:

I was surprised that one of my daughters didn’t know who Genghis Khan was, but I did have the materials on hand to show her.

[theherbstorian]

Me, a nerd, showing people pictures of my new niece on my phone:

"Perfect baby Mia!"

*swipe*

"Isn't Mia adorable?!"

*swipe*

"Look at those chubby cheeks on Mia!"

*swipe*

"Oops, that's the 18th century Field Marshal I'm currently obsessed with"

*swipe*

"Mia sleeping on my sister!"

*swipe*

"Mia sleeping on her dad!"

*swipe*

"Uh, that's just a screenshot of a book I need to buy."

Etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam because this nerd is a proud new Auntie!

[your-instructions-from-moscow]

Considering a career in History? Read the following excerpt:

Halfin’s Foucauldian project is to reject a reading in which sociopolitical context is used to determine the "real" meaning of utterances. Rather, he argues, his aim is to "transcend ... reductive understandings of language" in order to show not what discourse conceals--that is, to impose a present sensibility on the historical record under the false pretence of objectivity--but to remain at the level of discourse itself in order to show "how it operates and with what consequences" (p. 30). Foucault himself did comment on the Soviet regime (although the question has been mooted as to whether his theory and methods are appropriate to apply to Soviet Russia), but this issue is not made a part of Halfin’s analysis.[4] Rather, he applies a Foucauldian model of discourse to argue that, in the broad sense, language is a "constitutive force" which "brings society into being" (p. 28)--and that in the Bolshevik milieu, so deeply and overtly steeped in ideology, linguistic discourse was the indispensable precursor to action. Thus, struggles were fought directly through language (p. 86). The institutions which waged these conflicts should then be understood as "embodied discursive formations" (p. 211) x

Did reading that make you irrationally angry? Did your eyes start to bleed at the sight of the phrase "Foucauldian project"? Then, sadly, the history department might not be right for you.

[history-and-stuff-and-things]

When you know someone, somewhere, is taking history out of context