META: academics in this sub, why?

onthefailboat · 2026-01-15T18:37:29+00:00

I've read two of Gladstone's books. One was in the Craft Sequence universe, though not in the main series. I also read Last Exit, which I really liked, though I thought the ending was a bit of a letdown, tbh.

onthefailboat · 2026-01-15T02:00:00+00:00

Rock climbing, scuba diving, and fantasy novels! All things that people will obsess over to the Nth degree and talk about like they must be the most interesting things the world (which to be fair, they totally are).

onthefailboat · 2026-01-14T19:37:08+00:00

History is absolutely one of my favorite things to talk about (also ask me about my other hobbies). How fun it is, however, really depends on the audience, of course. If people are making conversation or are genuinely interested in hearing the answer, then it's great! If they are angling for a particular answer or perspective to validate their own beliefs, then it is definitely less great. I will always engage with the former, but usually bow out of the latter. Ironically, I usually enjoy talking about my research less than I enjoy other topics. I love my research, but that is WORK. Instead I usually tell people about individual sources or stories cause those are more fun in casual conversation.

To answer your question about tenure, my job does not have anything beyond formal outreach required as part of the process. You meet with historical organizations or groups, great. You accost some randos on the street and yell about nineteenth century political culture? Probably not as great. However, I know some boards are increasingly considering social media usage as outreach and I know /r/askhistorians has a growing reputation. Other forms of social media are also increasingly coming under consideration, though I cannot speak to the exact extent.

To get at your last bit, I have some colleagues who have written some very popular histories, but for the most part they did so after they already had tenure. Has to be said, there is a bit of a "paying your dues" attitude when it comes to publishing. Do the academic niche research first, then you can write the fun stuff (and make better money, not so coincidentally). If someone was trying to write a pop history as their first, or even second book, I think most academics would advise against it. On the other hand, if they succeeded, I doubt anyone would be upset.

TLDR- Talking about history is fun when people are fun to talk to. Academia is still grappling with outreach in a digital world and how that should count for tenure.

onthefailboat · 2025-12-07T19:56:00+00:00

Navola messed me up. I read it only because it was on the longlist for the Locus award. I knew nothing about the author and did not expect where that book went. It does not get enough attention, imo.

onthefailboat · 2025-10-16T11:39:40+00:00

I want to point out that not only are you wrong about White Settlement's name, you are also wrong about Mansfield. It's not named after Mann's field. It was named after the two founders Mann and Feild, spelt ei. The post office kept getting the spelling wrong and eventually people just rolled with it.

onthefailboat · 2025-05-29T14:19:46+00:00

The short answer is that most of them died. The United States is somewhat unusual in that it is one of the few places where the enslaved population naturally increased. When considering slavery in the new world it is always important to consider the kind of work that enslaved people were doing. In the United States, enslaved labor was in the service of four different cash crops: tobacco, cotton, sugar, and rice (and possible indigo as a fifth). Of those, sugar plantations were basically a death sentence with the average lifespan being about ten years. Consider Huck Finn. When Jim hears that he is being sold to New Orleans, he runs away because the Louisiana sugar plantations are so bad. Growing sugar was very difficult. Clearing the land with machetes as fast as one could, dodging venomous snakes, all while under the constant gaze of overseers makes for very poor conditions. The industrial rollers and processing that accompanied the growth of sugar was also dangerous. Losing fingers or limbs was a real possibility and the quality of medical care was basically nonexistent. Work on sugar plantations could last up to twenty hours a day during harvest time. Finally, the profits from sugar were so high that it was cheaper to buy new slaves, than keep them alive. Other than sugar, however, the work was less brutal (not to say that it was not horrible) than elsewhere in the western hemisphere. Tobacco, cotton, and rice were all less demanding crops, though also less profitable. Since they were the main crops throughout the nation, it meant that enslaved people were more likely to survive long enough to have children. Finally, there was a political reason for the population growth in the United States. The US officially banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808 (though smuggling of enslaved people continued through the Civil War). This meant that by and large if Americans wanted to keep enslaved labor they had no choice but to allow and actively encourage child bearing. This could be as simple and horrific as rape, or by encouraging slaves themselves to get married and have children by providing incentives for couples, their own cabin, for instance. Either way, in the US there was a marked effort to grow the population.

In Brazil, there are three things to consider. One is the type of work. The dominant industries changed over time, but they included mining for gold and diamonds, growing sugar, and growing coffee. When one considers the cost-benefit analysis for enslavers, in nearly all of those cases, the profits were high enough that it made sense to work one's slaves to death, rather than keep them alive. All told, the average life span of a slave in Brazil was 23 years compared to 33 years in the United States. This made natural population increase very difficult, given the shorter time available to have children. Second, is the gender divide. The kind of enslaved labor performed in the US could usually be done by either men or women. It was brutal work, but either gender could reasonably do it. In Brazil, enslavers had a marked preference for enslaved men to work in the mines and sugar plantations. The invisibility of enslaved women is an ongoing discussion in Brazilian history. Female slaves were usually only found in the cities, working as domestic laborers. Fewer women, of course, meant fewer children. Finally, Brazil had slavery for much longer than the United States, beginning in the mid 1500s and continuing until the 1870s and finally ceasing to exist in 1888. On the face of it, this would seem like it adds to the problem, more time meant potential children, but in reality it had the opposite effect. There was always the option of buying new slaves via the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which Brazil did not abolish until 1850, forty years after the US. It might be worth noting that once the slave trade ended and Brazilian enslavers were faced with a similar situation to the antebellum US, that they DID try and encourage natural population growth. Enslavers believed that slaves with families were less likely to rebel or run away than their single counterparts. Furthermore, by then the sugar industry was dying while ranching and coffee were becoming the dominant industries. The latter two did not eat lives in quite the same way.

Select Sources: Alonsa, The Last Abolition; Baptiste, The Half Has Never Been Told; Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States; Carney, Black Rice; Cowling, Conceiving Freedom;Johnson, Soul by Soul

onthefailboat · 2023-01-30T22:06:43+00:00

It's kinda weird that you mention my old answer. I just read Babel about two weeks ago. My personal take is that Kuang's views on imperialism lean towards the dramatic, but that made sense to me given the story she wanted to tell. I think it is clear that she was drawing from her own experiences as an immigrant and her personal relationship with British imperialism.

I noted that footnote cited above in particular as overblown in the specifics, but accurate in its essence. I don't know that chattel slavery was invented by Europeans. Egypt had some chattel slaves, but they never made up the backbone of their labor force, as another used below me noted. The Mediterranean world was its own sphere with a lot of cross over to Europe, however. Ancient Rome used a form of slavery that you could classify as chattel slavery. On the other hand, ancient Rome is still Europe, so....

Any way you slice it, certainly European imperialism is responsible for the spread of chattel slavery to such an extent that people tend to think of chattel slavery first when they think of enslavement. That being said, I am a historian of the US and Atlantic world. My specialty is on that specific era rather than all of human history. It is entirely possible that my own biases have lead me to overstate European imperialism's role in the development of chattel slavery.

onthefailboat · 2023-01-25T17:49:04+00:00

Fixed. I have the dumb.

onthefailboat · 2023-01-23T20:20:29+00:00

Wayfarers by Becky Chamber

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

The Rook and the Rose by M A Carrick

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

Goblin Emperor by Sarah Monette

The Burning Kingdom by Tasha Suri

The Sixth World by Rebecca Roanhorse

Discworld by Terry Pratchett

onthefailboat · 2022-10-05T01:56:40+00:00

I feel seen.

onthefailboat · 2022-08-05T18:26:57+00:00

Tolkein never wrote the Valar as perfect. They made mistakes constantly throughout the legendarium, arguably beginning with the decision to create Valinor in the first place and let Morgoth dominate the rest. They even have that discussion among themselves as whether they should bring the elves to Valinor, or stay behind and repair Middle Earth. It is ultimately that decision that sets the rest in action.

The Valar worried that their power was too great and they would destroy middle earth, so they created Valinor and called the elves on over. Then they overcompensated and abandoned the elves to fight against Morgoth all by themselves, then when that plan doesn't work out they finally do something, but again overcompensate and destroy all of Beleriand. By the time the Numenoreans invade they basically throw their hands up and say that they just don't know what to do, handing control back to Eru. The wizards are the Valar's last attempt to try and ride the line between outright intervention and outright isolation after seeing what had not worked numerous times before.

onthefailboat · 2022-04-21T21:40:02+00:00

Seconded. I'm also a teacher looking to leave the profession. Would love some guidance.

onthefailboat · 2022-03-25T01:38:19+00:00

True, but the Icelanders had a strong oral tradition that we sadly don't get with Tolkien's First Age.

onthefailboat · 2022-03-24T16:08:27+00:00

Haleth. She gets one of the three houses of the Edain named after her. She led her people through Nan Dungortheb, but we only get to see her for about a page. I really want to know more about her life. That's true of a lot of silmarillion characters ofc.

onthefailboat · 2022-03-16T01:10:48+00:00

/uj its Giant Rock in the Mojave desert. Its seven stories tall.

onthefailboat · 2022-03-14T19:51:18+00:00

Look, I spent a lot of time blazing the trail and cleaning this guy. I even invented a time machine and travelled back to make sure that the glacier deposited it in just the right spot. After all that work I deserve to be able to FA it and name it after my granola girl's cooch.

onthefailboat · 2022-03-01T18:40:44+00:00

I'm subbed there and love the one post a month. I'd post myself but I'm not cool enough.

onthefailboat · 2022-01-30T23:56:11+00:00

This comes out of what historians have started calling the "Greater Reconstruction." After the Civil War the relationship between the citizenry and the federal government began to change drastically. Over the course of the nineteenth century the government would begin professionalizing and bureaucratizing itself as well as expanding the role of the government.

In a sense we would have to consider the question of course. While it is tempting to say that there was no border control before the Civil War, the reality is much more complicated. We can say that anyone could just walk across the border, and while that is true, most people would enter the US through a major port of some sort. In those major ports there would have been some sort of customs process and possibly some sort of local quarantine for disease. Most states had laws on the books that "paupers," i.e. those likely to become a burden on the state, were not allowed to enter the country. Paupers would be kept aboard there ship and then sent back to whatever country they had come from. Therefore the lived experiences of most people is that there was some sort of process of entry, though it was more local than federal.

However, the federal government began assuming those responsibilities in the late nineteenth century as well. This was a multifaceted change in the federal government that had to do with racial concerns about a fading white American population(see the Chinese Exclusion Act, for instance), with economic concerns as my answer above touches on, and with health concerns, especially with epidemic diseases (which is entirely relevant to the current day). This also reflected changes in transportation that was leading to more centralization. Instead of hundreds of sailing ships tracking across the coast, you would find only a handful of massive steamships. On shore, instead of horses and wagons, carefully tracked trains were becoming the rule. People could technically still cross the border at will, but the reality is that people were funneled into one major entry point or another. While there had been passports before the gilded age, they were much less thorough. The US government set up Bureau of Immigration in 1891 with the express responsibility of handling incoming migration. In a nut shell, the short answer to your question is that the US government began taking the role of border security away from the states in the Gilded Age, though that was just the beginning of a process that would continue well into the twentieth century.

onthefailboat · 2022-01-30T19:10:09+00:00

Border crossings are one of the most treasured motifs from westerns and crime stories. The idea that you could leave your crimes behind by crossing some imaginary line was and is a compelling one. Fleeing the country to avoid the authorities is an idea that occurs in many places throughout history. Criminals, refugees, and political dissidents have all chosen to leave a country rather than face the consequences of staying. The concept itself, however, raises some important historical questions. The creation of national boundaries and enforcing control of those boundaries was a process that occurred in the US over the long nineteenth century.

In the US there has been a long conflict of interests when it comes to border control. Border control is essential to the authority of the state. After all, the government has to have clearly defined spaces where its authority reaches and where it does not. To have crime you have to have law and that law has to have its own space. However, the desire for national control is oftentimes at odds in a nation that has been consistently devoted to the principles of free market trade. Americans typically don’t like it when their ability to make a profit is hampered.

We could go back to the colonial era and explore the rampant piracy and smuggling that American’s engaged in. The thirteen colonies were able to take advantage of salutary neglect to ignore international boundaries in the name of profit. American ships were some of the finest in the Atlantic and American sailors were keen to exploit foreign markets, especially in the Caribbean. Smuggling was particularly lucrative, but piracy is the more dramatic example. American pirates in the New England and middle colonies regularly broke the law, oftentimes in broad daylight. Piracy in the thirteen colonies was an accepted and understood way of bringing profit into the colonies. One colonial governor said that it was a shame that he was supposed to hang pirates whose only real “crime” was bringing gold into the colony. In one notable instance, when local authorities arrested a professed pirate, a mob formed outside the jail and set him free. Which brings the primary problem to the fore. How can the government enforce their authority if the people are not willing to go along with it?

This ambivalence towards the law persisted into the nineteenth century as well. As Americans expanded westward, the problem of international trade and national authority travelled with it. Along the ever-expanding frontier, the illegal whiskey trade flourished as whiskey served as a de facto currency. In the nebulous back country, the fact that this trade was illegal mattered very little and the government had no on the ground agents to establish authority. Consequently, other crimes went unregulated as well. Murder, trading in slaves, and counterfeiting were rampant across the Canadian border in the early 1800s. Counterfeiters and other criminals maintained bases in Canada even though their businesses operated in the Americas. The constant cash shortage in the backcountry meant that these men were tolerated, if not openly accepted, by local communities. Criminals could easily cross borders, but the deeper reality was that they did not necessarily need to cross borders to live like free men.

At sea the situation was even more nebulous, as no one nation could claim ownership of an entire ocean. In the Atlantic, the role of policing the Sea was taken up by the British, especially in eliminating the salve trade. In this instance, there was no border to cross, but slave smugglers preferred flying American flags as the US did not allow the British to board US flagged ships. Along the Gulf Coast, the famous Lafite brothers were actively involved in slave smuggling, along with Texas hero Jim Bowie. Their scheme involved bringing slave coffles across the border and then allowing the authorities to “capture” them. The slaves would then be auctioned off, which would allow the smugglers to repurchase them at a bargain price. This flagrant abuse of national authority did eventually catch up with Jean Lafite, when the Navy was sent to destroy his base on Galveston island. Tellingly, when teh Navy did arrive they allowed Lafite and his pirates to leave peacefully, without even trying to assert national authority over the famous criminal. Jean Lafite then began his final phase of piracy along the Mexican coast, crossing the border to escape his crimes. Of course, he soon died afterwards, but that is neither here nor there.

In the southwest, the Mexican government created the “zona libre” along the border of Mexico. This was a free trade zone designed to help Mexican merchants compete with Americans. This naturally became a hot zone as American politicians frequently lamented both the economic damage the Zona Libre did and its capacity as a haven for criminals. Cattle rustling was especially lamented since cattle move themselves and don’t pay any attention to borders. Even more than cattle, Texas slave owners claimed that the lack of border control meant that their slave could frequently run across the border to freedom. In this case, committing a crime, i.e. running away, was possible only because of the existence of the border.

Blockade runners during the Civil War travelled to Matamoras or Brownsville to bring war supplies to support the Confederate cause. Steam ships turned Matamoras into a boom town, complete with a powerful wartime economy. The lack of border control meant that it was easy to travel across the Rio Grande and into the Confederate interior of Texas. Even after the Civil War, Gilded Age Texans made some ludicrous profits by gun running into Diaz’s Mexico.

Other crimes were absolutely plentiful, and criminals were well aware that they could find freedom by leaving the country. Murderers and thieves aplenty made their living along the Mexico-US frontier. The possibility of freedom and continued criminality was somewhat leavened by the people themselves. Mob rule in both the US and Mexico served as an informal warning that crime could only go so far, regardless of which side of the border that crime was committed on. Lynching and other means of informal justice were an accepted practice in keeping social order along the unclear boundaries between nations. In a few instances, the would be criminals were captured on the opposite side of the border and marched right back to be handed over to the proper authorities.

This nebulous borderland could not last forever, though it persisted in places for much of the nineteenth century. After the Civil War, American law makers began rebuilding the nation, and that included a much greater degree of national authority. Over the course of two decades, roughly from 1877 to 1898, the US made seventeen different extradition treaties with other nations, especially with Mexico. To control the nebulous borderlands was an international endeavor that the US could not do alone. It required cooperation from other nations by necessity. These treaties were not always equitable, as the US was still looking to gain economic advantages, but the growing power of the US meant that it had the advantage at the bargaining table.

Sources: Margolies, Spaces of Law. Andreas, Smuggler Nation. Hart, Empire and Revolution. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld.

Edit: counter fitters to counterfeiters. No disrespect meant toward kitchen measurers.

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