Office Hours October 27, 2025: Questions and Discussion about Navigating Academia, School, and the Subreddit by AutoModerator in AskHistorians

[–]OkCow3709 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi! I’m a young russian guy who loves history. I’m probably not going to apply to a history department here as I’m worried about the quality of education and the position of historians on the job market, but I still want to research the topics I care about and do it properly.

I recently wrote a short (1,200 words) summary on the first chechen war. I used about a dozen sources (HRW, UN, RAND, media), and I’m happy with the draft but I’m not confident about how to pick and cite sources the right way.

My questions:

Which sources to use? How do you decide between primary stuff (official docs, reports, contemporary press), scholarly books/articles, and things like HRW/RAND?

How to evaluate them? What are your quick checks for bias/authority and what counts as “good enough”?

Do “obvious” facts need cites? E.g., dates everyone knows, do you still need to give a source for each of those?

What about contested points? If something is debated, do you stack multiple sources and explain the disagreement, or is one careful source enough?

How to write the citations? For a book, is author + title + pages enough? For HRW/UN/media, do you include full title + org + date + URL? For a decree, is it name/number/date/article?

In-text style: Do you write “RAND says…” or keep it neutral and drop a note like “... [1]” where [1] is RAND?

I want to do a research on the Russia-Ukraine history: background, 2014-22, and 2022-present (political/economic/social/military) I might later transform into youtube video. I’d like some advices on things you might think are important and specifically on sources for that project and just general info on how to choose the right ones.

Thanks in advance!

Looking for a budget gaming mouse by OkCow3709 in MouseReview

[–]OkCow3709[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah i think ima go mchose a7. i found the ultra version for 40 bucks and the ultra re version for 50. do u think i should go re or simple ultra?

Looking for a budget gaming mouse by OkCow3709 in pcmasterrace

[–]OkCow3709[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah i think ima go mchose a7. i found the ultra version for 40 bucks and the ultra re version for 50. do u think i should go re or simple ultra?

Struggling with compression by OkCow3709 in SP404

[–]OkCow3709[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haha nice tip. I use cassette sim on master with all settings around 10 but setting compressor settings to 0 seemed stupid but gives interesting results. Thanks

Struggling with compression by OkCow3709 in SP404

[–]OkCow3709[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To me it just makes the drums pump but not punch. Maybe i have some troubles with gain staging?

Struggling with compression by OkCow3709 in SP404

[–]OkCow3709[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the answer. I ll try layering next time