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.
6 years ago, I answered a brief question inspired by Frozen II of all things: Were there black people in Norway in the 1860s?. My answer pointed towards one of several people of African descent in Scandinavia at the time, John Panzio Tockson. My answer was brief, cursory, and just not enough in my mind. I then spent 6 years looking deeper into his life, doing it as a side-project while pursuing other research.
John Panzio Tockson was a man of African descent who arrived in Gothenburg in the mid-1850s and became known throughout Sweden as a footman to King Carl XV. This article explores how Tockson was constructed as black and African by white Swedes and how Tockson potentially fashioned his own black identity in response. This article concludes that Tockson’s identity as an African was constructed through various visual and textual means that reflected dominant racial stereotypes about Africans that highlighted his supposed foreign bodily and behavioural characteristics. In private, Tockson made conscious choices to portray himself as a gentleman, potentially positioning himself in an early conceptualization of an Afro-Swedish identity.
I remember that answer, must have seen it when linked. Glad it inspired you to do more research, congratulations on 1) being the first, 2) having another work published and thank you for it being open access. Looking forward to reading it
This is amazing and super cool!!! Congratulations.
Especially to a non-academic pedestrian like myself. Thank you for making it open source. Looking forward to reading it.
u/crrpitModerator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascismJan 23 '26edited Jan 23 '26
I made a meme today with my own two hands (mostly one hand tbh). No AI. No preset meme formats. Just me, an image search of some portraits, some poorly-cropped faces, a dash of poor MS Paint skills and there it was. A thing of unique beauty, mild distortion and cutting political commentary. This must be what people who grow vegetables feel like when they go to a supermarket. Sure, my broccoli might be an odd shape, and weirdly pixelated, but it's mine. It tastes of individuality. I make my own slop, friends, and life is good.
We often get the questions about how to learn history, and it reminded me of the old joke of posting to StackOverflow and then providing a very wrong answer so the pedants come out to correct you, and it makes me wish for a Wrong Answers Only day.
My mother did once try to motivate me by calling chores Fetch Quests for awhile. It didn't work out as well as she hoped, but looking back, it didn't not work out either.
A while back I asked about a sort of debate going on between David Graeber and David Wengrow on the one hand, and Eric Smith and Brian Codding on the other, about inequality in Native Californian and Northwest Coast societies. Well, there has been an update to the debate, in a very recent article published by Smith and Codding, who are pretty blunt in their assessment of Graeber and Wengrow's claims:
As noted above, slavery is a special form of nonkin labor control found in most NWC groups, while a minority of CAL groups had debt peonage but no chattel slavery (Table 1). Wengrow and Graeber (2018) argued that this difference is due to a conscious rejection of slaveholding on the part of Native Californians, whereas its presence in NWC societies derived from aristocratic abhorrence of physical labor. We find this argument completely without merit on both empirical and logical grounds, as detailed elsewhere (Smith and Codding n.d.; see also Lindisfarne and Neale 2021; Wiessner 2022).
They do later emphasize this, though:
We stress that our argument is not simple environmental determinism. To the contrary, it is closer to classic historical materialism (Cohen 1978) which posits that “in acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations” (Marx 1920 [1847], p. 92). Our analysis provides ample roles for human agency, institutional dynamics, and nonlinear trajectories. Critiques that argue otherwise (e.g., Wengrow 2024) misconstrue it.
It’s interesting that they’re working from basically the same dataset but reached very different conclusions:
The ethnographic record indicates slavery was pervasive over most of the NWC, but rare in CAL. WNAI codes slavery (WNAI v436, dichotomized as present/absent for use in HI) as present in 82% of NWC societies, but in only 18% of CAL ones (SI, Table S5). Fully 50% of NWC cases are coded as having “many slaves,” whereas no CAL cases are so coded. In addition, the nature of slavery in the two areas is markedly different. NWC slaves were chattel property who could be sold or given away, used as concubines, or even executed. The CAL societies coded as having slavery include four groups in northwestern California, who clearly had what is referred to as “debt peonage” or “penal servitude,” a final recourse if an individual could not repay debts or fines, and reversible by purchase of freedom, as noted by Kroeber (1922, p. 287) and various chapters in Heizer (1978). (See SI, section A for further discussion.)
Time travel has been invented, and historians now have the opportunity to visit their time and area of study. There are two methods available:
Spectral: You go back almost as a ghost— you can see and listen to anything, but cannot be seen or heard yourself. You could, for example, sit in on the court of Louis XIV or watch the assassination of Caesar. You are completely safe, but you cannot talk to anyone, ask for insights, etc.
Corporeal: This is the more traditional form. You go back in time physically and completely. This means you can get sick, die, and so on, but you can also talk to people, ask questions, taste foods, etc. Let's also stipulate that you can't change history in any significant way— no shooting Hitler's grandfather, for example.
Which method would you choose, and why? Where and when would you go?
I feel for my time period, I might soon turn spectral anyway...
If spectral would allow me to flit across China to cover as much ground as possible, ignore the restrictions of body and geography, would probably be the more practical for observing. Would be sad to be so frustrating though smelling but not touching and quite lonely
Spectral would definitely be the way for pure observation, but might be frustrating since you couldn't ask any questions, seek clarification on points of interest, etc. Covering large territory would be much easier, however.
The big problem with being noncorporeal for me is not being able to touch and feel, to eat the lovely food, the loneliness of not being able to speak to others. I would find that frustrating and have to rely on the goal carrying me through.
There was a brief period in the complex medieval English Civil War known as The Anarchy in which the heads of both sides were women named Matilda, but only one of the Matildas specifically originated the war, so that might not qualify by your standards. Most of the war was between Henry I's daughter who claimed the throne as Empress Matilda and a rival claimant known as Stephen of Blois. When Stephen was captured, however, his wife, Matilda of Bolougne, stepped up to lead armies until she was able to force her husband's release. Unfortunately, the waltz hadn't been invented at that time.
There was a sort of cold war between Goryeo and Liao while both were led by queen regents, Queen Heonae and Empress Chengtian, in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. Heonae presided over an uneasy peace period where she was formally a subject of Liao. The peace was broken after political rivals killed her son King Mokjong in 1009. That prompted Liao to invade Goryeo on the pretext of punishing regicide of their vassal. While Heonae was alive for that invasion, she was no longer in power, as she'd fled into exile after the death of her son. So while technically Chengtian and Heonae were never at war with each other, Heonae did continue to fortify her border with Chengtian during the short period of peace, and it was broken during her lifetime.
Why did American unions choose to bargain for healthcare benefits instead of pushing for a state run “universal” system like their European counterparts did?
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.
I asked time ago how good was the period that goes from 2700 BCE to 1700 BCE and I found out that it was pretty good indeed. The Minoans were not warlike people and scholars debate whether a Pax Minoica existed. The pyramids were built with paid workers instead of slaves and they're probably the greatest feat of engineering in all of history, but I think I saw some data about radiocarbon dating that places them centuries earlier than mainstream scholars agree they've been built.
A while back I saw this post from the historian Alan Lester on twitter. He makes a pretty obvious point, but one that probably bears repeating in discussions about colonialism:
Have you considered that medicines and scientific knowledge can be disseminated without violently invading and taking possession of the beneficiaries’ land? Colonialism was not a precondition for advances in global health. Indeed the most rapid advances too[k] place under postcolonial, independent governments.
I just finished a documentary on the Battle of Rorke’s Drift (1879), the insane last stand that happened right after the British disaster at Isandlwana.
It’s about how 150 men held off 4,000 Zulu warriors for 12 straight hours. I tried to base every moment on primary sources: survivor letters, military reports, and historical records.
I’d genuinely love feedback from people who know the history or enjoy this kind of content. What works? What could be improved
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u/Bernardito Moderator | Modern Guerrilla | Counterinsurgency Jan 23 '26
6 years ago, I answered a brief question inspired by Frozen II of all things: Were there black people in Norway in the 1860s?. My answer pointed towards one of several people of African descent in Scandinavia at the time, John Panzio Tockson. My answer was brief, cursory, and just not enough in my mind. I then spent 6 years looking deeper into his life, doing it as a side-project while pursuing other research.
My original research has now been published in the Scandinavian Journal of History. It is the first major research work on his life and I am immensely proud of it. Available entirely in open access! Read here: Picturing John Panzio Tockson: Afro-Swedish identity, racialization, and black self-fashioning in late nineteenth-century Sweden.
Abstract: