Jonathan Dean

Best of January Voting Thread Posted in r/AskHistorians by u/Georgy_K_Zhukov • 9 points and 12 comments

Its time for a vote #Skystorians! We're determining the BEST answers of January 2026, and you get to help decide the winner. Come check out all the nominations!
old.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...

remember back when we all doodled the current thing for warmups? we could bring that back, maybe, that was fun

Apparently Adobe popped to Bluesky like a flower in Spring.
And then ended like that.

Google with AI buttons

Google without AI buttons

I made a filterlist for uBlock Origin to remove Generative AI features on websites. Includes blocks for
* Google AI Summaries
* YouTube Ask button & chat summaries
* GitHub Copilot
* Facebook AI chat
* X's Grok buttons
* Deviantart DreamUp
* Booru AI images
* And more

github.com/Stevoisiak/S...

YouTube video by The Fateful Force REAL Leather Amour Tested. 13th Century Recipe.

Stavros doing more excellent experimental archaeology in his back yard: youtu.be/HQVy7J5ecCA?...

This time he's testing a 13th century Islamic recipe and, despite the obligatory clickbait title, the video is quite thoughtful on the limitations of the test and ambiguous results.

#MedievalWarfare

Nine markings from longbows, left ot right: Top row - Circle of dots, a cross with wonky horizontal arms, three dots, Middle row - a circle with a cross inside and dots in the four quarters, two rows of three dots with one on the left, a circle of eight dots, Bottom row - circle of seven dots, a cross and a vertical row of four triangular dots

Nearly 90% of the longbows found on the Mary Rose have these markings just above where the bow was held.

They have been interpreted in several ways: their similarity to markings on the chests they were found in may mean they are bowyers’ makers marks.

maryrose.org/discover/col...

Can still access books digitised by google books via Hathi Trust and archive.org as a workaround

Ugh no. Aargh. Google Books has stopped working.

#medievalsky

It's such an effluent name. You could tell she was stinking rich with a name like that.

It's on now! I am at the AskHistorians Reddit Forum answering questions about KGB spy fiction & my new book #KGBLiterati! See you there! @socintelhist.bsky.social

SideQuested Book 1 Let me be absolutely clear: SideQuested wouldn’t exist except for Ale Presser. We were working on our first comic for the better part of two years before she told me she had this idea for a f…

So SIDEQUESTED book 1 is getting some amazing reviews and I'm over the moon, but due to how publishing works they always put the author's name before the illustrator's, and I need to emphasize all of this is because of @alepresser.com

#book #books #BookSky #art #artist #author #writer

Bruh. America was a predominantly agricultural nation; weather impacted crops and staples prices; it impacted transportation; it led to spikes in death from heat and cold; it impacted pedestrian mobility; impacted the ability to fight fires; it impacted military conflicts, legislative sessions /1

DISCO ZEBRA!!!
🦓🦓😍

well thank god I'll never know what this is referring to *5 seconds later* jesus christ

I love this 1662 drawing in a legal document involving a dispute over a ditch.
So detailed!
And look, a well full of clean water and a stream nearby.
The 3 story building still exists.
www.archive.nrw.de/landesarchiv...

How to be a Werewolf launches again tomorrow, Tuesday, February 3rd! To mark my 11th anniversary, I'll be starting out by posting a short story with Vincent and Elias, and the cover for chapter 14 will be posted at the end of the month :D. You still have time to catch up! howtobeawerewolf.com

lmao i already wasn't travelling to the US but holy shit

Christopher Nolan should have cast Helen of Troy the way the Greeks would have: by casting the most attractive young man in the company and giving him a really fuckable porcelain mask.

Having a WOMAN play Helen of Troy??? Talk about inaccurate. The Greeks would fucking riot.

I wish I had the comedic chops to mock this with full mocking mockery that the need for mockage can summon. There is no thing that needs to be more fully mocked than this mockery of a human being. (not you Jerry. Nick)

Screenshot showing that r/Conservative, noted bastion of free/awful speech, is now ranked just one above us in weekly visitor numbers.

Please make it your new resolution to visit AskHistorians once a week, because we've never been this invested in overtaking another community.

According to the colonial science that Nitobe espoused, a civilized nation's government had an international moral obligation to organize the planting of its own self-defined civilized subjects in places not yet enlightened in ideas of modern agriculture to carry out such ideas and methods of production. In a logic highly charged with ideas of Social Darwinism and Malthusian economics, rationally planted people rationally developed land in uncivilized places whose inhabitants were, by virtue of being trapped in their uncivilized state, unfit to realize such methods on their own. Put another way, and in Nitobe's own words, as his students at the Tokyo Imperial University in the 1910s remember him writing on the blackboard every morning at the beginning of their colonial policy classes: ‘Colonization is the spread of civilization (植民は文明の伝播)’. Nitobe's science of ‘planting people’ (植民) made Japan’s imperialist expansion resonate with the political science of civilizing missions around the early twentieth century world.

Two phonetically identical variants of 'colony' (shokumin) existed-'to plant people’ (植民) and 'to increase people' (殖民) and, as its chief policy promoter, Nitobe encouraged his government to select 'planting people' as the standardized term: Regardless of its general use, however, the characters shokumin (植民) are used in the vernacular but not yet officially ... [Whenever] names of places like Korea, Taiwan or Karafuto are mentioned ... they are referred to as ‘new additions to the empire'. Does it suffice to name these newly occupied territories with old expressions? Wouldn't it be better to use the new term—shokuminchi (植民地)?

TIL (unsurprisingly) that the Chinese term for colonisation (殖民) borrows from Japanese, but also (more surprisingly) that one of the main theorists of Japanese colonialism, Nitobe Inazō, was genuinely thinking about colonial agriculture when he advocated writing 'shokumin' as 植民 over 殖民 in Japanese.

Verdun 1916: Steel Inferno by Walter Vejdovsky — Stuart Ellis-Gorman Like many people I imagine, I first heard about Verdun 1916: Steel Inferno from a livestream on the Homo Ludens YouTube channel , where several prominent designers of card driven games (CDGs) highl...

It has been a while since I reviewed a game but I'm back! This week it's the excellent Verdun 1916: Steel Inferno from Fellowship of Simulations. This is one of the hottest CDGs of the last few years, and while it is impressive, do I love it?

...yes? ish?

www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/verdun-...

The 2026 SA State Election Candidates Tracker Hello all! This is yet another tracker I have decided to put up to engage with SA's 2026 election. This one will look to track the candidate...

For the Policy Tracker, I've added in new policies from Labor, the Liberals, and the Greens, as well as the first policies from One Nation and the Nationals (the Nationals actually have some interesting ones weirdly enough).

anthonyhistoryrant.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

#saparli #auspol

The 2026 SA State Election Candidates Tracker Hello all! This is yet another tracker I have decided to put up to engage with SA's 2026 election. This one will look to track the candidate...

New update on both the candidate and policy tracker! For the Candidate tracker, I've added in all of Animal Justice Party's candidates, as well as a new candidate from Labor (Andrea Michaels replacement), Liberals, and One Nation.

anthonyhistoryrant.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

#saparli #auspol

ARTE

Heroic Appearances: Or, What Did Helen Look Like? Helen ‘appears’ for the first time in the Iliad in book 3. What does she look like? A few years ago, there was a bit of a to-do about the ethnicity of Homeric heroes. While some sketchy appli…

Heroic Appearances: Or, What Did Helen Look Like?

sententiaeantiquae.com/2025/11/12/h...

#medievalwarfare

Cyberpunk campaign idea: the corporate apocalypse and the splintering of the internet have left old archives of human knowledge and culture shattered. You play a group of data-hunters tracking down lost books, files, and knowledge on behalf of the only group that cares: the Wikimedia foundation.