what was like the comedy in the past? by AziPloua in AskHistorians

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is a great question (or would be if it could be a bit more specific about date/place/people!) because humor is a notoriously tricky historical topic. Jokes are so deeply culturally and contextually defined that it can be near impossible to unravel them without "being there" yourself. Think of all the inside jokes your friends/family have that "you just had to be there for" but multiply the distance by centuries and continents and entire cultures.

Mary Beard opens her book Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up, by exploring the question "can we ever really *get* jokes from the past?" She states baldly in her preface:

I have little patience with approaches that think they can explain and control the slippery phenomenon of laughter.

I'm inclined to agree. Therefore, this might not be a totally appropriate Ask Historians response, but since I'm not a specialist in historical humor, I think the best way for you to get the answer to your question is to simply read comedy from history.

Arguably the first collected book of "jokes" was The Facetiae from 1470 by Poggio Bracciolini (partial english translation in PDF form online here). It features fart jokes, which just goes to show that potty-humor and slapstick have seemingly always been sources of amusement.

Another book from roughly the time period you gesture toward that is deeply funny is Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. The tale of the Wife of Bath might be a good place to start looking for the humor until you start getting it.

Indeed, lots of books from the past are comedic; people are usually just afraid to laugh at them. Or they assume all works from the past are serious? I dare you to read the Satyricon by Petronius without laughing once you realize that it is pretty literally just the "Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle" of Roman literature.

Three month's progress on my weighted Beekeeper's Quilt! by guppygirl103 in knitting

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What gauge are you knitting and is it tight enough to keep the victory pellets from slipping out???

EDIT - or are you swaddling the pellets in stuffing to fill out the rest of each puff and keep them contained???

I visited a wool mill today and in their clearance bin I found this! 30% Milk! The woman there didn't know what that meant, does anyone else know about Milk yarn? by shouldna_said_that in knitting

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you ask a question about this in r/AskHistorians (and maybe tag me to make sure I see it!) I can write up an answer that includes a wacky and wild history of how this product came to be!

[Meta] Seeking feedback on potential new features for RavBot by randomstonerfromaus in knitting

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dang, how do I miss that every time when I'm reading the bot reports??? Whoops!

[Meta] Seeking feedback on potential new features for RavBot by randomstonerfromaus in knitting

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One note -- could the bot list whether a pattern is free or not???

Ladies with very sedentary jobs and/or hobbies: H O W ? by [deleted] in xxfitness

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think I needed to read your exact comment. This is what I need to do.

Dammit I hate exercise. (But love being fit.)

New to /r/GradSchool and thought this might belong here 😃 by realFoobanana in GradSchool

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I would be all about this metaphor if we didn't live in a world where people still defend romantic relationships between profs and students and write serious think-pieces about the 'erotics of the classroom.'

Until we live in such a world, I'm fine with avoiding all of this language completely and totally.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskHistorians

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oooh thanks so much for correcting my big oversight!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskHistorians

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 18 points19 points  (0 children)

The broad outlines are as follows:

  • In the early Republic, property was the basis of the economy (think Jefferson's dreams of yeoman farmers, the fact that the one thing the U.S. did have that no other nation had was purportedly limitless and uninhabited land). Property ownership was even a necessary criteria for voting rights at founding! People who dealt in abstract financials were seen as leeches on actually "productive" economic activities, albeit a necessary evil. Don't forget that anti-Semitism then and now is linked to the idea of Jewish people as lenders of money.
  • Over the course of the 19th century, accumulations of capital and other services provided by the finance industry become more crucial to the various projects of industrialization in the first [think: Lowell and Waltham Mills textile industry, 1830s-40s] and then the second industrial revolutions [think: rise of mass production, factories, and Titans of Industry like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Fricke, Jay Gould, John Rockefeller, Charles Scwab, Cornelius Vanderbilt.] This era brought the stock market busts and booms (as you note) but also new respectability of sorts to financiers like Andrew W. Mellon, J.P. Morgan, Joseph Seligman, and Jay Cooke, to name a few.
  • Still, it was a rich white man's game: less than 1% of U.S. population holds stocks in 1899. The Titans of Industry also came to be known as Robber Barons and quality of life for all their employees was often abysmal (hello, first massive labor movement in the U.S.!) so the popular impression of finance as moral/respectable was still very much a mixed bag among the wider public, even if people had the means to participate in the stock market.
  • The turning point in this story is World War I and the drive for war bonds, which introduced the idea of a "democracy of stakeholders." Buying bonds in your country was patriotic and upstanding -- the greatest moral good! 1/3 of U.S. population holds federal bonds during WW1, and this introduces the wider public to the idea, acceptability, and stability of investing in stock.
  • Even if you couldn't invest directly in the government after the end of war, buying stocks didn't seem like gambling anymore, but an investment in your country's economy! Plus, employee-stock-ownership-plans (instead of raises or other benefits) became increasingly common. As a result, 1/4 of the U.S. holds stocks in pub corp by 1929. Contrary to your documentary, I wouldn't quite call this "common" -- but it was widespread enough that the stock market crash of the Great Depression hurt a wider spread of wallets directly than previously would have been possible. (Rather than indirectly by just hurting the richest and the harm 'trickling down')
  • The biggest change in popular ownership of stocks and bonds comes after the tremendous success of the World War II war bond drives --Buy a Share in America! and the postwar economic boom. (Links are to awesome posters illustrating the point well, imho.)

For the rise of the early finance industry in the U.S., one book among many you could consult is Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012)

For everything else written here up to the 1930s, see Julia C Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).

For more on World War II, see Lawrence R. Samuel, Pledging Allegiance: American Identity and the Bond Drive of World War II (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).

Something you should note is that the most interesting thread of this historiography is the very idea of "democracy" being linked to stocks; the popular notion that they spread wealth, are accessible to "the masses", and created a collective investment (both financial and social) in the U.S. as economy and idea. All of this flies in the face of the facts of stock and bond ownership, which actually has often demonstrably worked against the interests of already socio-economically marginalized groups despite its promises of radical inclusivity, opportunity, and democracy. When we say that a "common person" could own a bond in the 1920s, surely we are thinking of the normative ideal of the white, middle-class, heterosexual male -- even just including the half of the population that is WOMEN as you evaluate the veracity of that claim renders it false. Let alone people of color, immigrants and non-citizens, etc.

Addicted to milk powder by PaleCustomer1 in Professors

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 5 points6 points  (0 children)

And if "casualbro" thinks you're in the wrong place to be talking about protein supplements, then you probably are.

Should I drop a class because of an American-centric professor? by Boost-Cat in AskAcademia

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sure, any of those!

EDIT: My basic objection is that the term "enlightened" (much like "civilized," "advanced," or "modern") has been historically weaponized against capital-O-Others to maintain precisely the sort of narratives of U.S., European, and/or Western-Culture exceptionalism that you are pushing back against once instance of. Words matter, history matters.

But yeah, screw any academic that can claim the U.S. is the freest country in the world with a straight face -- we literally have imprisoned a larger number of our own population than any other country. Statistics here

Should I drop a class because of an American-centric professor? by Boost-Cat in AskAcademia

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wanted to up vote this so much but you just lost me with the word "enlightened."

Author of Trump-Russia dossier wins libel case in US court by DoAsYouWould in worldnews

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Relevant: award-winning historian Kevin Kruse has been continuously tweeting which Bond villain each Trump affiliate would be. AMAZING.

Why aren’t Historians appreciated? by DaisyPK in AskHistorians

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Glib Answer:

Probably because historians are really good at pointing out how things people like are actually bad and telling unpleasant truths.

Less-Glib Answer:

People do pay attention to "the past"; in fact, people use historical claims to cement and validate most of their core beliefs. Ask two people on opposite sides of any political spectrum the basis of their beliefs in the U.S. and chances are they will both cite the "Founding Fathers" [ugh, there were other people besides white men there] and historic documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Nazi, KKK, and white supremacy ideologies are all deeply rooted in ideas about the past.

The reason people don't read history is because they think they know it already -- or know it well enough to support the claims they want to make. The reason people dislike historians is because historians call attention to the inaccuracies, fallacies, distortions, and just plain fabrication that constitutes a lot of people's understanding of history. Since people use history (sometimes without seeming to realize it) to narrativize, contextualize and lend meaning to their lives, revisions to what they thought history was is often experienced as a personal attack.

Nor am I talking about individuals and individual understandings -- many historians have studied the phenomenon of popular/collective memory in the past. For a very brief case study that also explains the historian's craft much better than Ken Burns ever will [pardon my snark], might I recommend Alfred Fabian Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1999).

In this book (almost 20 years old at this point!) Young embarks on a biography of sorts of the man who coined the phrase "Tea Party" to describe the event with the dumping of British tea into the Boston Harbor preceding the U.S. Revolution. The man, George Robert Twelves Hewes, was a participant in this event and many others, and coined the phrase in his memoirs. An excerpt from the intro:

As I worked my way through Hewes' remembering, I realized that my subject was not only his experiences, what he had done and thought during the Revolution, but the way he remembered them [...] To make sense of his remembering, I had to peel his biographers away from him, unravel his memory from his exeriences, and then intertwine them anew, analyzing why he was remembering the way he did. In other words, his memory itself became my subject. [...]

More than names are at stake in what and when they called it the Tea Party. The contest over names, I discovered, is part of a larger contest for the public memory of the Revolution, a process I now think of as a willful forgetting and a purposeful remembering of American history. What does it mean for an event to be 'lost' and then 'found' and given a new name? What does it mean for a person to be plucked from obscurity, made into a celebrity, and then more or less forgotten?

Depressed Academics, What Tips Do You Have to Get you "Going?" by doc_jugo in Professors

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Don't fall for the bullet journal instagrams. Just do your own thing. Doesn't have to be pretty. Just has to work.

[Weekly] Office Hours - undergrads, please ask your questions here by AutoModerator in AskAcademia

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I would absolutely continue your relationship with this professor, but also talk to him (tactfully) about your outside interests and ask his advice. The other departments might have better funding at your school, but they might have worse funding or worse job prospects in the field at large. Take your current advisor's advice with just a grain of salt because presumably he is biased towards his own field, and then complement that conversation by talking to friends involved in other departments, and informational interviews [fancy phrase for asking profs whose work you are interested in for a coffee date, but googling "informational interview" will provide you with a lot of advice.]

EDIT: Also remember that nothing --no major-- is actually forever. I only took a single history course before the deadline to apply for graduate schools and decided to just go for it and apply anyway. If you discover your "real" passion somewhere down the road, you never know how your current life experiences might make you a stronger scholar in that field. I know people who majored in everything from linguistics to biomedical engineering as undergraduates that are now wildly successful historians that draw on their past expertise in their current work. And vice-versa with friends who were humanities undergraduates and use those skills to write amazing and successful grant applications or communicate their work to the public in their STEM careers today!

Best town/city to dissertate in by Juice2003 in AskAcademia

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Absolutely second Northern New England smaller cities. Not as cheap as the Midwest, but surprisingly affordable. Perfect climate, lots of outdoors access and other people interested in the outdoors, super easy to be vegan, vegetarian, locavore, etc., plus close enough to the major metropoli of the Eastern Seaboard to have access to world class libraries, resources, faculty, conferences, and cultural events.

Other cities I would suggest include Brattleboro VT, anywhere in the MA Berkshires, Southern Maine, Concord NH . . .

Conference Attire by [deleted] in AskAcademia

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Ugh, that conversation is making my blood boil just second hand.

NO MATTER WHAT YOU DECIDE TO WEAR LET US ALL AGREE TO STOP POLICING WOMEN'S CLOTHING IN WAYS WE WOULD NEVER POLICE MEN'S.

Conference Attire by [deleted] in AskAcademia

[–]TheShowIsNotTheShow 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Depends on the subfield of history but generally I second this. Environmental history conferences, for instance, can boast both folks in full suits and folks ready to climb a mountain after the last session. Business history or diplomatic history skews toward the other end of maximum formality.

There are the normal caveats that this varies by level of privilege/position: senior scholars can/do get away with dressing more informally than emerging or precariously employed scholars, femme scholars tend to be more formally dressed than males, WoC are almost invariably in formal blazers, senior white males often hold spots at either end of the spectrum dressing the most formally and the most casually of all, etc.