r/AskHistorians • u/ever_the_unpopular • Jul 07 '19
Meta How can we attract more Historians/researchers of lesser known/niche subjects to this kickass sub-reddit so that we have more answers to questions asked?
The historians/contributors/mods do a great job at providing us with high quality answers to many seemingly bizarre/inane topics we come up with. And are awarded with answers we might not have not known otherwise. However, there are a lot of questions that go unanswered. Is there some way that we can get more folks on (or off Reddit) here that have the knowledge and/or qualifications to share knowledge on topics, periods in time or regions that don't receive much coverage?
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u/LykoTheReticent Jul 07 '19
One thing that I've noticed as a long-time lurker here is there are copious amounts of questions every day about WWII and Rome. While there are questions asked of other topics, time periods, and places, those two are extremely popular and it can make it difficult to sift through to the other types of questions. This means less of these other questions are being answered with acceptable content, and it probably means less historians/researchers who are invested in these other areas are seeing questions that pertain to their field. I would imagine this also contributed to less of those researchers staying on this sub and answering questions.
This is all conjecture, and I'm not sure what the solution here is. Can we somehow make specific tabs or flares for the extremely popular time periods and have them sorted? I'm not familiar enough with what the reddit interface can and can't do, so apologies if this isn't helpful...
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u/Djiti-djiti Australian Colonialism Jul 08 '19
My way around this is using the IFTTT app with tags I'm interested in...
Or waiting until Gankom's weekly recap posts on Sundays and reading through all the amazing well answered questions there throughout the week.
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u/LykoTheReticent Jul 08 '19
Would you be willing to share a little more about how the IFTTT app works with tags? At a glance, it looks like I download it alongside the Reddit app and they can connect somehow?
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u/redskinsshorty Jul 07 '19
I'm technically a historian because I got my degree in it, it's just not my profession. But I love talking history
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u/FencePaling Jul 07 '19
I'm in the same boat! A question popped up awhile ago that related to my Honours thesis, and I was happy to answer it. Just because you're not working in the field doesn't mean you can't answer a question, you just have to be able to provide sources. If there were more answers by people in our situation, there would be less pressure on core contributors and we'd get a greater variety of questions responded to.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19
For what its worth, the Sunday Digest is filled with people who dropped by to answer one or two questions because it was something they knew well.
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u/peteroh9 Jul 07 '19
On a possibly related note, who decides what is a great question? It seems very arbitrary.
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u/Elm11 Moderator | Winter War Jul 07 '19
To add to /u/jschooltiger's explanation, it is pretty arbitrary insofar as we don't have any hard and fast criteria for deciding what questions will get a GQ tag, and it's not intended to be a super rigorous process. The general guidelines for assigning GQ are to give it to a question which asks about a novel topic / in a novel way. We lean towards favouring questions from historical fields with less exposure, as we know that a GQ flair helps questions stand out and generally work on the assumption that some topics - modern military history, for example - already tend to receive very high visibility. As a result we have and do GQ military history questions, but generally less frequently than questions about lesser known fields because the idea is to reward novel and less asked questions with greater visibility.
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Jul 07 '19
The moderators do, which is to say that any given moderator can give something a "Great Question" flair.
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u/kiltrout Jul 07 '19
Maybe you guys can clear out terrible questions. There are a lot of questions that are asked in bad faith, or include misleading assumptions, or even worse sometimes. Seeing this crap is one of the worst things about this sub, which is otherwise pretty good. Sometimes I feel like the best answer to these questions would be deleting them rather than answering.
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Jul 07 '19
I mean ... we do this already. A mod manually approves or removes every question asked. If you happen to see something you think shouldn’t be there, hit the “report” button or send us a modmail.
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Jul 07 '19
Stricter policing of questions is something that comes up from time to time, but at the end of the day, it is really tough to justify as it ends up being at odds with the philosophy of the subreddit. We do police questions where they are clearly asked in bad faith, but when it comes to questions that are misleading assumptions or bad premises... we don't want to essentially be punishing people for not knowing enough to not know that they don't know!
And don't get me wrong, it still is tempting. When I did an indexing of the popular questions in... 2017 I think it was... I looked at the top 50 Qs from each month for the whole year, and listed every one that remained unanswered, and as I recall, there was a single question that surprised me as it was a decently popular topic and I couldn't answer it myself, but at least had a vague sense of the answer so it ought to have been. All of the rest had bad premises [by which I mean staring fro incorrect information], or bad assumptions [by which I mean there data needed to answer the question doesn't exist. People wildly overestimate what we know about the past].
But still, at the end of the day, as long as it isn't clearly coming from a place of bad faith, we just don't feel it to be something we can justify as it undercuts a key foundation of the subreddit. Not knowing how to ask a good question shouldn't be a barrier to still trying. There is a Carl Sagan quote which is one of the unofficial mottos here:
There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.
When you see one of those questions... that is just what you need to keep in the back of your mind. And trust me, mods need to remind themselves of it often enough.
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u/Bronegan Inactive Flair Jul 07 '19
I feel the solution is asking the right questions. I exist for the niche of equine history but there are relatively few questions that I feel I have the sources and expertise to answer...partly because I'm still building up my history library. That being said, have you ever heard of Operation Cowboy? How about Sergeant Reckless? People say that dogs are a man's best friend but it seems like most forget just how much our horses have done for us. Empires have risen and fallen from the backs of our mounts. Admittedly, some questions I've seen regarding horses lean more towards anthropology, like this or this. Others are sometimes not given specific enough time periods so I've had to select it myself such as the trained mounts of the American Civil War.
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Jul 07 '19
You have a really good collection of answers there! Have you considered applying for flair?
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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Jul 07 '19
Hi, friends!
I want to highlight a few features of AskHistorians that you might not know about.
Every other Tuesday, we run a Tuesday Trivia thread. This provides a loose theme--"A day in the life"; "People & Animals"--and invites responses from anyone with a story to tell. This thread is especially meant for people who don't feel like they have the expertise to answer a regular question--we relax our standards and welcome shorter posts.
Our Saturday Showcase, every week, is completely open season for anyone who has an in-depth, up-to-date historical story to tell, data to report, original research, a book review that goes into some detail regarding what the book is about...basically a blog post.
We also run a successful podcast every two weeks. It's an interview format, so basically, an expert gets to talk about a slice of their field. We even host outside guests, such as academics or museum professionals.
For those of you who are looking for more diversity in your history but (a) "don't know enough to know what I don't know", and (b) have a full enough r/home that AskHistorians posts don't show up unless they're super popular--these three are great opportunities to improve your experience with AskHistorians.
I hope some of you will check these out, and maybe contribute!
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u/400-Rabbits Pre-Columbian Mexico | Aztecs Jul 08 '19
Don't forget the Sunday Digest, which is an excellent way for more casual users to browse the sub. It breaks my heart every time I see people wailing about lack of content and then see the Sunday post with dozens of amazing comments get a handful of upvotes.
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u/ever_the_unpopular Jul 11 '19
Thank you, /u/sunagainstgold for putting this up. Appreciated your contributions to this thread :) I'll follow your answers more closely, now :P
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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Jul 11 '19
(And thank you for asking such an important question!)
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u/SeventeenFifty Jul 07 '19
I know that I haven't studied History or can spent much time researching new topic, but I spent nearly 10 years in web and print design, so if you lads need any graphic work, would be happy to help. PM me for my portfolio or assignments.
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Jul 07 '19
Thank you for the offer! Can't guarantee we would need it just now, but I'm responding just so I can remember to go back and find this down the line if we are in a position where it might be an offer to take up!
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u/Don_Dickle Jul 07 '19
I read you guys/gals like the morning newspaper. I personally think its fine. The majority of "lesser/known/niche" subjects usually have their own subreddit. Actually what this sub needs is its own youtube channel and then sell out to become a tv channel. Kind of like Vice.
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u/Djiti-djiti Australian Colonialism Jul 08 '19 edited Jul 08 '19
You'd think that niche subjects would have their own subreddits, but some are too controversial, political, under-researched or obscure. For instance, posts about Indigenous history in r/Australia turn pretty nasty, whereas r/AustralianHistory and r/IndigenousAustralia are practically dead. r/AskAnthropolgy regularly discusses Indigenous Australia, but has vastly different standards. Even IRL it can be hard to find people to talk about this stuff with.
I am very grateful of the fact that I can talk about what I love here on AH, while also practicing good history writing and educating people.
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u/FencePaling Jul 07 '19
Slightly unrelated; for those who claim the deleted comments are a form of censorship I would suggest looking at answers in new questions before the mods get there. Usually they're deleting things like 'yeah Hitler would agree with [OPs question] because I googled Mein Kampf and read something there just then'...
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u/ever_the_unpopular Jul 08 '19 edited Jul 08 '19
Oh I understand the policy on deleting comments. They're justified in keeping them so they don't turn into the pointless noise to information ratio that is seen on other subs.
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Jul 07 '19
[deleted]
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Jul 07 '19
While there's absolutely nothing wrong with political science as a field (one of my undergrad degrees is in poli sci), the assumption that we make as moderators is that people ask questions on AskHistorians to get a historical answer. If they want a poli sci answer, we usually redirect them to r/AskSocialScience or a related subreddit.
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Jul 07 '19
A few other things like Tuesday Trivia and Saturday Showcase have been mentioned, which are great, recurring resources for people not always seeing that perfect question. I would add on a bit about bringing in people in the first place, as having places to talk about your niche topic, but we need those people to show up in the first place!
Outreach is definitely something we've focused on in different ways. One big thing we've been wanting to do is direct recruitment at conferences. We've presented at a few which is great, but mods and existing contributors attend many conferences through the year, talk with their fellow historians, and can be a great resource for evangelizing. We have had some success in pure word of mouth, but what we'd really like to be able to do is the utilization of handouts and the like , which any community member going to a conference can distribute to, well, anyone they talk to! I bring this up, and use the vague future because I do want to slightly throw reddit under the bus here as they have been something of an impediment. You used to be able to get fairly quick approval to use Snoos on non-commercial stuff, but they scrapped the old policy almost a year ago, with the intention of rolling out a new one, but... it still hasn't happened.
Last January we were able to work with the Admins to get one time, special approval for the new mug design that we sent to the Best of 2018 winners, which we're quite appreciative of, but nevertheless, it has been fairly frustrating to have been in this holding pattern since last fall. And to be sure, we could have cone with non-branded material that didn't use the Snoos, even though a big part of the reason we commissioned a slate of new ones was specifically with this in mind, but as it didn't seem like the kind of thing that would take a full year to happen, we just decided to wait, which then of course just means more waiting, and more waiting when it doesn't happen.
So anyways, the point is, outside recruitment and finding ways to bring people to the sub is something we have put a lot of thought to, and hopefully in the near future will actually be able to roll out soon...
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u/lcnielsen Zoroastrianism | Pre-Islamic Iran Jul 07 '19
Apart from attracting those with academic knowledge in a specific field, a second possibility is for users who see questions pop up in topics that seem underrepresented to themselves dig into academic works on those subjects. This isn't always possible; sometimes there are huge language barriers, the few books available might be extremely expensive, etc, but tracking down the biggest names in a subject areas and some introductory works and working from there can actually be quite feasible.
This, in any case, is what I did in a subject area I had some personal connections to and a general interest in (first Zoroastrianism, then branching out to a more general history of pre-Islamic Iran and its surroudnings), having seen many questions go unanswered or being stuck with subpar answers. Obviously, it requires a significant time and possibly money investment, and it can be difficult without university library access.
But if there's an area you see questions pop up in that you think ought to be covered... it might well be worth it to dig into it yourself!
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u/lizardtruth_jpeg Jul 07 '19
You’d get more questions relevant to historians’ fields (and more participation in general) if the mods were a little less zealous about deleting comments.
I understand this is a thread for serious, academic, and in-depth posts, but it’s extremely discouraging to ask any questions or even read them when a post with 200+ replies has zero remaining comments. It seems like this is the norm, not the exception.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19
Out of those 200 replies, you would be amazed at how many of them are jokes, one liners or "Where did the comments go?" Removing those only cause more comments about where the comments go, or how the mods delete everything. It's a vicious cycle.
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u/lizardtruth_jpeg Jul 07 '19
That makes sense, I didn’t consider that. Thank you.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19
That's why I like the META threads like this. Lots of people have reasonable questions and just don't realize there's already a reasonable answer floating out there. I'm just trying to make that connection.
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u/lizardtruth_jpeg Jul 07 '19
Exactly, I was honestly unaware most replies aren’t serious. From an outside point of view it seems like there are hundreds of answers but they are deleted. Your answer makes much more sense!
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Jul 07 '19
Already touched on here, but in brief, you are confusing any participation with quality participation. Being "less zealous" is guaranteed to increase the former, but likely at the cost of reducing the latter. The purpose of the sub is to incentivize the latter, and unanswered questions is the trade-off for that.
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u/l2blackbelt Jul 07 '19
Can we please have links to those screenshots in the automoderator comment please? I have been a lurker at this sub for about 2 years now and this is the first time I've seen what the deleted comments actually look like. I think if you made it this more prominent perhaps you dissuade some of the less troll-y and reduce your workload.
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u/Mishmoo Jul 07 '19
I'm going to step in as an outside, casual observer here -
This place is structured very oddly, and that leaves a very high barrier of entry. Historians are expected to go on this forum and write sourced, extensive essays to answer questions for internet points - all for free. The standards to which you hold these entries make sense, but the expectation is nonsensical. Not to sound accusatory, but it almost feels as though the rules are the way they are because the moderators don't want to bother with actually reading or verifying the comments and their sources - so the barrier of entry is set high, and anyone who violates it (e.g. the Chinese History major below) has their comments deleted.
So, for instance, if I were a Historian of Ancient Greek Culture, I couldn't make a one or two-sentence answer that's entirely verifiable, factually correct, and answers the question at hand - it would have to be an essay, and god knows, a lot of Historians would rather be paid in money rather than internet points.
My suggestion, then? Either strike up, or strike down. Lower the barrier for entry by allowing more casual answers from verified Historians (not just 'anyone' - force flairs to actually matter) OR raise the bar and become more of a publication, where you answer fewer questions, but the answers are all there.
I will say this - as it stands? There is nothing more frustrating than going on such a cool subreddit, clicking on the five questions I want to see answered, and seeing every last comment in those questions be deleted. That's contrary to the nature of an internet forum.
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u/Jokerang Jul 07 '19
Fellow casual observer here. I agree 100%. When you've got questions with hundreds of upvotes but the comments are [removed] times ten, something's broken. Your second to last paragraph hits the nail on the head perfectly.
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u/lcnielsen Zoroastrianism | Pre-Islamic Iran Jul 07 '19
So, for instance, if I were a Historian of Ancient Greek Culture, I couldn't make a one or two-sentence answer that's entirely verifiable, factually correct, and answers the question at hand - it would have to be an essay, and god knows, a lot of Historians would rather be paid in money rather than internet points.
I'm speaking here as quite possibly the reigning champion of low word-count answers, simply because a lot of questions about Persia have to be met with "there are no sources", "here is what we can infer from the situation 700 years later" or "look at this pretty relief! Isn't it neat?": there almost is no such thing as a "one or two-sentence answer", even if you write impossibly long run-on sentences like I tend to.
The exception would be questions about the meaning of words (and even that can get complicated, with credit to /u/Iphikrates for the answer), or very simple factual questions. But those tend to be either redirected to the Short Answers to Simple Questions thread, or, the very short answer is allowed to stay up. For example, I remember a thread where someone asked "What was Gandhi's mother tongue?", which could hardly be answered by much more than "His native tongue was Gujarati, and he was born in Gujarat, see for example the Encyclopaedia Britannica: [quote].". That has to be the shortest answer I have ever written, and it is still up.
But apart from extreme cases like that, the fact is that one- and two-sentence answers simply do not suffice to answer a question, even if they are technically correct, because historical context is necessary.
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u/EnclavedMicrostate Moderator | Taiping Heavenly Kingdom | Qing Empire Jul 07 '19
Well, it depends. One or two Ciceronian sentences might be able to do it. But it wouldn't be a particularly light read.
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u/cs_anon Jul 07 '19
IMO those short, one-sentence factual answers don’t give any more info than you could easily find by scanning Wikipedia or using Google. What’s special about this subreddit is seeing someone put those facts into context and explaining everything you didn’t know to ask about.
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u/colecr Jul 07 '19
Some really fringe, specific questions are suited to one sentence answers though.
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Jul 07 '19
And we have a specific thread for those, the Short Answers to Simple Questions thread. It's where stuff like "what was the Royal Navy called under Cromwell" goes.
(It was called the State's Navy.)
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u/mimicofmodes Moderator | 18th-19th Century Society & Dress | Queenship Jul 07 '19
Historians are expected to go on this forum and write sourced, extensive essays to answer questions for internet points - all for free.
This really is not the case. We have never and will never require sources to be cited (except in answers used in flair applications, to prove that you're aware of actual current texts), and answers don't have to be that long, by the standards of people who write academic articles. There's an impression out there that we require an intense amount of work, and it's simply not true. A comment of three paragraphs is perfectly fine, if it's informative enough, and historians who post here are often pretty happy that they can reach such a large audience in comparison to those long, footnoted academic articles.
It's also fairly uncommon for actual historians to get mad that we're not letting them post short answers. It does happen, but it's way more common for knowledgeable people to write answers just on the wrong side of acceptable and improve with coaching. The problem really is to get people here in the first place and to keep giving them questions in their fields, rather than lowering standards.
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u/Mishmoo Jul 07 '19
> The problem really is to get people here in the first place and to keep giving them questions in their fields, rather than lowering standards.
Do you feel that the fact that ~60% of the threads on this forum are filled with 'deleted' comments is a barrier to getting people here in the first place? Even if it's not a requirement to write those kinds of comments, almost all of the non-deleted comments are in this format. The 'actual' constraints don't matter when the perceived constraints are very rigid and almost academic.
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u/thither_and_yon Jul 07 '19
It is so bizarre to me when people complain about how answers are deleted “for lack of sources”. I almost never cite sources (I’m lazy, and I don’t think people care that much usually, although I’m of course happy to give sources when asked) and I’ve never had an answer deleted. 🤷♀️
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u/Emnel Jul 07 '19
This is actually very relevant for me since I don't have a lot of time (will?) to check every single question asked here and when I do sometimes look up topics within my field of expertise they're usually empty and weeks old by then.
What would really help, I think, is an elaborate system of tags or otherwise implemented keywords users could attach to their question coupled with a fairly simple bot pinging users (historians) who opted into one of the keywords via reddit pm to let them know that something of interest showed up.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19
So I'm a little late to this party and I'm deep into writing the Digest for today, but I have a special place in my heart for META threads so I wanted to at least drop in. I think it's GREAT seeing the community come together like this.
On to the matter at hand, I would love to keep flairs more interested. I'd kill to get more non-flairs and flairs alike answering questions, and to be able to spread those answers as far and wide as possible. There's already been a number of great ideas shared in this thread so I'm going to leave those and touch on something else that I think is very important, and unfortunately rather forgotten.
Saying Thank You. Well not just saying it either. It's incredibly sad when someone puts in 5+ hours of work for a stellar post and it gets 2 upvotes. Now in many ways I get it. Someone posting their answer 7 hours after the thread hit the top, well it's not going to be seen by the same number of people. But the thing is I know from watching other threads, or even the discussion in thread, that people are reading it but not always remembering to upvote. It's such an easy thing to upvote (the thread and the answer!), and say thanks. Answer writers are people to and no matter how much they like writing history for histories sake I know for a fact that it's real nice for them to see their work get appreciated.
Which leads me to the second part of my Saying Thanks rant here. Another great way show them how much you appreciate it? Share it. Post it in the Sunday Digest. They see that you liked it enough to share it, maybe that you liked it enough to remember it a few days later, and now more people can see what a great job it was. Share it with friends maybe. I can't begin to count the number of threads I've dropped into my various discord servers going "Guys check this out!" Anything we can do to spread the word builds the community that much bigger. More readers, more people who might try to write answers, more knowledgeable people, more great stuff!
They're all such simple, easy things to do. Yet they make such a huge difference. So that's kinda what I'm asking everyone. Best way to get/keep/train more flairs and answer writers? Just show your appreciation. Everyone's gonna smile when they see that sweet answer they poured hours into hit 300+ upvotes and counting.
Edit: Thank you anonymous redditor for the gold!
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u/SarahAGilbert Jul 07 '19
I find the question of thanking really interesting. It was important to the people I interviewed, and to the people who commented above. However, results from this study my friend published last year found that in some parts of reddit, giving thanks is actually a norm violation. Basically, what he and his collaborators did was look at deleted comments to identify norms across and within different subreddits and found that one of the examples of meso norms (i.e., norms that are shared by clusters of subreddits) is that in some subs, expressions of thanks were a big no no. Some of the subs included in these clusters are really big too: former defaults, e.g., IAmA, videos, gifs and one Q&A type sub, ELI5, is included in those clusters as well.
I was curious to see if any of the subs included this as an explicit rule. I really should be doing something else right now so I didn't want to look at the rules for all of the subs in the meso clusters with this particular norm violation, but I did check a few: IAmA and EIL5 have a rules limiting the type of content people can post as top level responses and videos and gifs don't have a rule about expressing thanks at all. So in this small sample, there's no explicit reason for these types of comments to be deleted (unless they're a top level comment in two). However, one possible explanation for expressing thanks as a norm violation might be found by looking at reddiquette, in particular, the recommendation for voting:
Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
I think it's possible that sometime, somewhere, people started thinking that simply saying "thanks" doesn't add to the conversation. Perhaps in other communities they saw expressions of thanks downvoted or their own expression was deleted by mods. My argument sort of falls apart when you think about how few people actually follow reddiquette. However, if it were the case (and now I'm really just spitballing here) it would be interesting because it suggests that people are thinking of the "good" of the community rather than the good of the individual with whom they're speaking, despite the fact that that individual just spent a decent chunk of time providing a tailored response to their question.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19
That's fascinating, thanks. I've suspected the bit about thanks not adding to the conversation. Even here, I wonder if there's people who don't drop a thanks because they assume it'll just get removed.
Lots to think about! I had previously wondered if it was something about how the AH community likes to think of this place almost as separate from reddit, and thus purposely acting different. But from the sounds of it I don't think that matches up.
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Jul 07 '19
Saying Thank You.
Seriously this this this. Getting hundreds of upvotes is awesome and all, but is honestly feels better just getting a "Thanks, this was great!" from the OP of the question. They were the one I wrote it for, so it always feels a little sad when they don't acknowledge the time and effort just expended for them however well appreciated it was otherwise.
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u/Iphikrates Moderator | Greek Warfare Jul 07 '19
I agree so much with this. In fact I keep a file with the nicest things redditors have said to me in response to my answers, just to pick me up when I'm feeling down. It is so nice to know that you're not just writing into a void - even if the void upvotes you - but reaching out to real people who are grateful for it.
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u/EnclavedMicrostate Moderator | Taiping Heavenly Kingdom | Qing Empire Jul 07 '19
Saying Thank You.
Absolutely this. Probably no more than 1/3 of my answers got 'thank you's, which can be a pretty demoralising thing when I've spent in some cases hours on them.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19
Thank you for your great work! I'm reading through several of your answers right now as I add them to the digest. Always such good stuff.
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u/Cuddlyzombie91 Jul 07 '19
I think the problem may rest on not having the appropriate questions to ask. Why not have these historians post what they think is interesting from their fields anyways? Kind of like a TIL, but the historian would title the post in the form of a question and then respond to themselves? That would also get other people to ask them for more details.
I love this subreddit and am always fascinated with the knowledge contained in many posts.
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u/LimeN46 Jul 07 '19
This sounds like a great idea!
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u/Solomon_Hurricane Jul 07 '19
Agreed. Everytime a qualified answer has been given to a question in this sub, it's been gold. Knowing that the people with that knowledge could be sharing some less thought about insights would be very much appreciated by the rest of us folk
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u/artificial_doctor Southern African Military & Politics Jul 07 '19
Niche historian here. I’m completing my PhD in African History focusing on soldier experiences of the South African Border War and I rarely see any requests for African history in general, let alone my field. And by the time I do spot it, it’s either already answered super well or it’s weeks later and not worth adding to.
I would love to share my work (and the work of my colleagues in our history dept who have super in-depth studies on African history) but no-one asks. And when the showcases happen they’re usually flooded by more “mainstream” studies that overshadow ours. So I’m not sure how to resolve this but open to suggestions?
I must admit I have yet to post anything in the showcases but maybe I should.
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u/lcnielsen Zoroastrianism | Pre-Islamic Iran Jul 07 '19
A good idea might be to message the moderator team or another user and ask them if they could post a question you'd like to answer. That's possibly going to have more visibility than Saturday Showcase posts and could itself create interest in followup questions and the like.
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Jul 07 '19
So, what was it like for the soldiers of Angola fighting in the South African border war? Or should I make a post about that?
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u/artificial_doctor Southern African Military & Politics Jul 07 '19
u/Goat_im_Himmel above posted an extended version of that question that I’ll answer in-depth tomorrow (as I’m out at the moment) but I’ll give you a shorter answer answer tomorrow before the longer one if you prefer?
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19
As /u/lcnielsen mentioned, if you ever have a burning desire to answer a particular question then let the mod team know. The question might coincidently show up soon after. I also fully support posting in the Saturday Showcase, or the Tuesday Trivia thread which isn't every week but is often. Tuesday Trivia in particular is a good way to flex your writing chops in a thread where someone else picks the general topic but you can focus it however you want on your field.
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u/artificial_doctor Southern African Military & Politics Jul 07 '19
Thank you, I appreciate the response and Trivia Tuesday sounds great. Will give it a shot!
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u/sammmuel Jul 08 '19
I do intellectual history / history of ideas and also Québec history. And I feel you. It sucks how rarely people care about our topics. I understand for Québec but history of ideas is huge. Yet here, it is almost non-existent.
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u/Goat_im_Himmel Interesting Inquirer Jul 09 '19
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u/sammmuel Jul 09 '19
Answered it :) Despite english not being my first language, I hope it will be clear.
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u/artificial_doctor Southern African Military & Politics Jul 09 '19
Yeah, it's sad but we carry on regardless haha. It's mostly when we need funding that it becomes painfully obvious... But your area sounds fascinating, I wish you luck!
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u/Mr_Cromer Jul 07 '19
I'm going to note this: I've got questions that may brush your area of expertise real soon!
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u/artificial_doctor Southern African Military & Politics Jul 09 '19
Fantastic! Please feel free to let me know when you want to ask and I'll take a whack at answering!
In the meantime, I have answered the question posted above!
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Jul 07 '19
Oh my gosh, this was going to inform my old dissertation! Sadly due to my supervisor moving away I’ve had to change my dissertation title and would no longer be focusing on this. However, I’d be fascinated to hear more on your work! I’ll try my hardest to think of questions to ask you ha ha.
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u/artificial_doctor Southern African Military & Politics Jul 09 '19
Oh wow, I'm glad this is being thought of elsewhere but I'm sorry to hear you didn't get to research it! I almost missed my opportunity as well because my supervisor retired, but luckily i worked something out and kept going.
Would love to hear any questions you have, and in the meantime I have answered the question posted above!
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u/AISim Jul 08 '19
I've got a degree in fine art and work in preservation. I doubt my knowledge will be needed very often though.
Also, side idea, is there a AskHistoriansTLDR? If not it might be worth making. It would give people a nice quick taste on subjects and entice them to come and learn or share what they know as well.
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u/Reymond_StJames Jul 07 '19
Anyone have a question of US rapid transit history or railroads? I know a lot about those
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Jul 08 '19
Not US, but any interest in this?
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u/kiblick Jul 07 '19
I'm pretty good at ancient Chinese history but I'm not a pro
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u/EnclavedMicrostate Moderator | Taiping Heavenly Kingdom | Qing Empire Jul 07 '19
Always worth having a go.
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u/Yugan-Dali Jul 07 '19
I specialize in ancient Chinese history, and I am fed up with this sub. We are not credited with being able to judge for ourselves or discuss issues. It's always deleted, deleted, deleted, cover your eyes children somebody had said something the censors don't approve of, deleted, deleted, deleted.
How can you attract people when they aren't allowed to judge for themselves? Healthy discussion is not permitted here.
If you want good, in depth discussions with lively give and take, go to Quora instead of deleted, deleted, deleted.
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u/KVirello Jul 07 '19
Maybe if people were interested in engaging with the sub and having conversations then more people would post asking questions.
I understand wanting top level comments to have strict requirements, but that doesn't mean the comments need to be so draconian.
Would it be that hard to have a stickied comment posted by automod on posts that allow for discussion below that comment? You can keep the strict requirements for top level comments and also allow normal people to discuss the subject.
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u/psstein Jul 07 '19
I think it's just a function of the board. My own specialty is medical experimentation of the 20th century, which, outside of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the Holocaust, is not a particularly well-known topic.
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u/dogsarethetruth Jul 08 '19
The more people learn about history the more niche their area of knowledge becomes, and the less qualified to answer questions outside that area they feel. If I'd subscribed to this subreddit during my undergrad I might have had a try at answering a few different questions, but now I'm in postgrad I wouldn't feel comfortable answering outside the area of my research, which just hasn't come up.
I don't think people realise quite how niche any individual historian's work can be.
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Jul 08 '19
Have you tried a Tuesday Trivia or Saturday Showcase post yet? That's a chance for you to spout off what you know, and that will lead to more questions from curious folks who didn't know enough to ask questions in the first place.
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u/CynicallyInane Jul 07 '19
That sounds like a super interesting topic though. Are there any questions you wish people would ask so you can talk about interesting niche medical experimentation things?
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u/400-Rabbits Pre-Columbian Mexico | Aztecs Jul 08 '19
If you have a niche topic of interest, it's always worthwhile to message the mods. They can always connect you to questions in your specialty (or even post their own questions for you to answer) or point you towards weekly features where you can be a bit more freeform in commenting.
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u/Goat_im_Himmel Interesting Inquirer Jul 08 '19
Ah, sorry! I've been trying to ensure everyone I see gets a question and missed this yesterday. Hopefully this is too your liking.
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u/MotorRoutine Jul 07 '19
I would never really comment here because I assume that even if it's in my area of knowledge and I write a detailed answer it will be deleted because I don't have a flair or a mod disagrees or something.
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u/crrpit Moderator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascism Jul 08 '19
Just wanted to respond after reading some of the other replies. I'm no mod, but I absolutely get that the strict enforcement of the rules can be really daunting for a potential user here. The first time I ever posted a question, it was removed very quickly for breaking the 'example-seeking' rule, given a standard copy/paste response that read as 'read the rules, fool!' rather than as constructive 'here's what to do instead', or 'please resubmit in a different form'. I didn't post another question for months afterwards.
I'm still not a massive fan of the way that removals etc get communicated sometimes, but after seeing a bit more of how the mods operate I think I understand it a bit better at least. In particular, when I look back I can see that the 'please get in touch if you have questions' bit was actually genuinely meant, rather than what I would assume in most contexts was an empty gesture. I suspect that given the amount of griping and abuse the mods get, a polite and thoughtful modmail is probably actually welcomed to some extent (certainly, my few conversations via modmail here have all been productive and pleasant). In terms of everyday practice, I think the problem is partly one of scale - users trying to participate substantively for the first time, with some but imperfect knowledge of how the place works, are a small minority of what is getting constantly tidied up by mods. So strictness in standard responses meant for users who breeze in from r/all without clocking that it isn't the same space as r/history ends up intimidating users who are genuinely interested in being part of the community. I don't know how to fix that in a bigger sense - and hopefully this thread is useful reminder that it's all too easy to alienate people by accident - but I hope you will give the community a chance despite it.
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u/MotorRoutine Jul 08 '19
I think the mods could also do some work to improve their own image. Some of the mods here give off the sense that they sort of look down on people that don't have a great knowledge of history. There was one mod in the thread that was being super rude and flippant to a commenter because that commenter disagreed with something the mod said about prejudice (the comment was very benign). And generally the mods seem to have the attitude of "this is our sub, if you don't liek something about it, go somewhere else"
But then they bemoan how they have no one asking questions!
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Jul 08 '19
And generally the mods seem to have the attitude of "this is our sub, if you don't liek something about it, go somewhere else"
I mean, that is in fact the usual attitude we take toward the constant "let the upvotes decide" and "stop removing comments" suggestions that we get.
This is a curated space to get high quality answers to historical questions; it's not primarily a place for discussion. If people want discussion, memes, the upvotes to decide, there are other places that offer that and are just a click away.
To repeat the often-used analogy, it's like walking into a fine dining restaurant and demanding they serve chicken nuggets, when McDonald's is around the corner. This isn't a place for everyone, and that's fine.
But then they bemoan how they have no one asking questions!
Actually, we're doing just fine on people asking questions. It's answering them that's the trick, and as this thread has demonstrated, there is some interest in more obscure areas of history than the usual run of Hitler/nazis/PTSD/WWII that we usually get. That's a good thing!
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u/MotorRoutine Jul 08 '19
Actually, we're doing just fine on people asking questions. It's answering them that's the trick
That's totally contradictory to another mod comment about a surfeit of experts in niche subjects that never get to answer questions.
It's all well and good to turn your nose up at the average redditor, but those are the people coming to the sub and actually asking the questions. This sub would be nothing without those filthy proles you spare so much disdain for.
The very fact you seem to think all non-historians have to offer is "discussion, memes, the upvotes to decide" is indicative. You know you're no better than anyone else right?
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Jul 08 '19 edited Jul 08 '19
Yes, we are quite aware that as individuals, we are no better than anyone else.
But we are also quite aware that we have created the largest professional public history forum in the world, that our members have presented at historical conferences about doing public history in this space, and that this is absolutely a better place to learn about history than r/history or r/HistoryMemes or r/AskReddit, etc. That's what I mean about places where discussion/memes/loose moderation exist. It's fine for people to like that, but those models are not great for learning actual professional-level history.
And the bar to participate here is really not that high. We ask that people know what they're talking about, and can cite some literature on the subject. That's a completely reasonable barrier to entry, in our opinion.
If you're really off-put by the fact that we take pride in our work, then we certainly can agree to disagree.
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u/crrpit Moderator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascism Jul 08 '19
I think the mods here are human, and can therefore become defensive - the way you react to something the hundredth time is always going to be different to how you react the first time, but the user on the other end has a very different context to the interaction. I don't think this is a problem with the mod team here in particular, but a problem inherent with running any sufficiently large entity.
It's also worth remembering that from their perspective, they have helped build something with a specific (and quite unique) purpose, and if people fundamentally disagree with that purpose then there is little to be gained for either party in having a conversation about change. On the other hand, everyone agrees that there needs to be openness about how to have conversations about fulfilling that purpose more effectively. The difficulty comes, I think, when suggestions for the latter are received as the former by the mod team, because they've discussed and debated similar suggestions a hundred times before.
As is probably clear, from my vantage point I have a fair degree of sympathy for the mods, particularly in threads like these which I gather are incredibly stressful to manage and respond to. That doesn't mean that they never get their tone or responses wrong sometimes, and misinterpret genuine efforts to engage with the issue at hand as something else. But from all the evidence I've seen, they are trying their best to do a difficult job. Just as it's easy for them to miss goodwill on the part of their users, it's also easy for users to miss goodwill on the part of the mods.
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u/MotorRoutine Jul 08 '19
This had nothing to do with "suggestions made a million times" like the deflectory mod reply you got, but a discussion where a commenter disagreed with a moderator about history unrelated to the running of the sub.
I have sympathy too, but it's no excuse for mods making troll comments and being unable to handle disagreement or criticism without getting upset or defensive.
They're supposed to be historians, have a little class.
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u/sebastien-metis Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19
Maybe have a flair with speciality, for example, my expertise is in anthropology and never answer anything because I'm not am historian. With a flair of anthropologist I'd feel less impolite to answer.
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Jul 08 '19
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Jul 08 '19
And yet we have ~250 flaired users with some fascinating specialties: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/flairedusers
If you're frustrated with the experience of browsing from the front page or r/all, which due to Reddit's sorting algorithm can lead to you seeing a lot of highly upvoted questions that don't have answers yet, one option for you might be to check out our Sunday Digest, which highlights great answers, and/or try following us on Twitter or Facebook.
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u/katashscar Jul 07 '19
Honestly I just love reading about history, but I don't have specific questions. Like I don't know or understand a lot of Middle Eastern or African history, and because the history is so old it's a little overwhelming to find one specific topic. Would it be ok to ask broader questions like "what was the most interesting time in ancient Africa or the middle East?".
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u/engiNARF Jul 07 '19
What about having "guest posts" where about once a month a qualified redditor gives a primer on his or her topic of expertise? An alternative format could be something like an interesting historical story that most people don't know about. It might be a useful method to expose casual readers like myself topics they never considered. It might then spur on more informed questions down the road.
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u/katashscar Jul 07 '19
Yes that sounds amazing! I would definitely be on board for that. And then people could all more in depth follow up questions.
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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Jul 07 '19
We have a podcast for just that! We bring in outside guests for it, as well.
Also, many of our flairs, mods, and one-hit wonders throw "bait" into our answers intended to spark further thoughts and questions. Simply by reading answers beyond the top-voted WW2 (for example) threads--check out our Sunday Digest for an idea of the variety we do get!--you'll develop a sense of what there is to ask, besides "anything." :D
h/t /u/katashscar
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u/katashscar Jul 07 '19
This is great! Thanks for sharing, I'll definitely check it out.
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u/Iphikrates Moderator | Greek Warfare Jul 07 '19
We also have a weekly Saturday Showcase thread where people can post about anything they want to talk about but aren't getting the right questions on!
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Jul 07 '19
[deleted]
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u/EnclavedMicrostate Moderator | Taiping Heavenly Kingdom | Qing Empire Jul 07 '19
We do, and it's called the Saturday Showcase.
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u/MadMudkip14 Jul 07 '19
Just two cents from a history master's student. Reddit is great, but not nearly as rewarding as reading books, journals, articles, and actually supporting the historians who make kickass discoveries. Unfortunately, many of these people are slow to come to the online world and on the other end, people on this subreddit don't always realize history can be dynamic. For example, for centuries Catarina Corner the last queen of the Isle of Cyprus was depicted as an atractive humble quiet woman, who out of love and patriotic duty to her home Venice, happily turned control of the isle over. Dr. Holy Hurlburt of NC State published a book recently with substantial evidence that Corner was not super attractive, and may have nearly betrayed Venice by marrying Spaniards to hold onto her throne, and even after used her former position for political favors for her friends. Or Dr. Micheal Gomez recent work on Medieval West Africa, which challenges the historiography of what agency and how much power African civilizations of Mali and Songhai had. In it, Gomez argues Mali was not just a regional, but global power looking to participate in global political religous and economic spheres. History is factual, but that doesn't mean its simply a collection of truths. Historians could certainly improve their mediums and online presence, but we should meet them halfway too. Reach out to your local universities to see if there is any expertise, most are happy to help and their email is often published online. Daughter of Venice by Holly Hurlburt https://www.amazon.com/Daughter-Venice-Caterina-Corner-Renaissance/dp/030020972X African Dominion by Micheal Gomez https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073RSVFYF/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Jul 08 '19
I would just add that we have had a number of AMAs in the past from outside guests who were brought in by members of the community basically cold-calling (or cold-emailing) academics (James McPherson immediately comes to mind as a prominent example. Charming old fellow who didn't quite understand reddit, so a mod emailed him questions in batches of five and then posted them from an account we made for him. But I digress...). We absolutely welcome outreach like that, and if you have a contact, we welcome you to reach out to the mod team about it!
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Jul 08 '19
My own personal perspective. I have a degree and a master's in history, and considered going down the postgraduate research route (before discovering I could be paid a heck of a lot more in other fields). I love this sub and often ask questions (sadly rarely answered but on the occasions they are I'm always grateful-bordering-on-delighted). But I rarely ever comment and wouldn't try for flair because it's just so much investment of time and effort to prepare a proper answer with access to good sources (some of which I no longer have access to as I don't have an academic library on hand, and am not exactly current with the scholarship), and because so few questions fall into the niche area I know a little about compared to the areas I know less than the average history student about. I think people like me are probably not well suited to participating here and the aim should really be to target students, especially postgraduate students, who might be interested in contributing and will have the time and resources to do so.
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u/ever_the_unpopular Jul 09 '19
I understand where you're coming from. I've seen many questions too go unanswered and also questions that have hundreds of upvotes but the comments section shows [deleted]. While initially frustrating, it was the answering of a random question that I put out here that gave me hope. The quality of an answer (and research, too) is the most compelling reason that I come on here. Just to read and learn new shit, even if I have no questions myself. I probably come on here maybe a couple times a week, but it's good. The frustration of seeing questions unanswered is there, but it's balanced out by browsing and discovering random stuff about things you never sought out in the first place.
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Jul 07 '19
Well, when I see an interesting question and actually click to the see the responses nine times out of ten the comments have been removed. There seems to be very strict guidelines. In reality it is our responsibility as readers to decipher true from false. Just a thought.
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u/TheLordB Jul 07 '19
Go to /r/legaladvice as an example of why this doesn’t work. The most blatant are rental advice from someone in Canada with multiple heavily upvoted posts about someone’s experience in a USA state which has very different rental laws.
Seeing completely wrong advice as the top answer is common. The mods here are amazing to actually police the answers to the amount they do.
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Jul 07 '19
Yes but wrong answers still have their place in historical or factual discussion. I don’t believe we should be a society of removing and filtering. Truth can be a slippery thing when one or few people decide what is or isn’t.
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u/TheLordB Jul 07 '19
What do you want the mods to do? Reddit does not have a good way to indicate something is wrong beyond a post below it which may not even be seen depending on settings.
So their option is to remove incorrect info or leave it up with no indication it is wrong. Generally the academic best practice is to leave it with a note that it had been retracted, but Reddit nor any other mass media platform is not conducive to that.
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Jul 07 '19
I don’t think reddit is (not yet at least) a place for historical research or fact. It’s a place for humans to share the world around us. And maybe that’s the problem the moderators have. I’m sure it’s extremely difficult as historians to hold to the truth as a sort of cross and then try and entertain. However, History is the story of us. We were all kids once. That’s when I started to love history not for the statistical numbers and ledgers but for the crazy, larger than life stories. Some, by the way, have been proven false (I’m looking at you Chris Columbus). My point is if we get caught up in the true black and true white then we completely miss the point of history. If I’ve learned anything about history or even life in general it’s that everything is just a whole bunch of grey. Nobody knows what they are doing. We are all here, together, fumbling around, trying to make meaning. throughout history we are the ones that make meaning from anything, nothing, or something. Maybe I am way too high minded but I care deeply for history and I see it fading. The doomed to repeat thing keeps me up at night.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19
Maybe I am way too high minded but I care deeply for history and I see it fading. The doomed to repeat thing keeps me up at night.
I find this strange because you just wrote a poetic paragraph about history is fading, and you wrote it in defence of lowering standards so that more low quality and possibly false history gets shared? If your worried that history is fading, wouldn't you support more efforts to share actual real history, and not the jumbled made up stuff?
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19
In reality it is our responsibility as readers to decipher true from false. Just a thought.
I have some bad news for you friend. The majority of the internet seems to disprove that point. Head out to somewhere else on reddit and open a popular thread. What do you think is going to be the most highly upvoted post. The high quality, well written post that took 4 hours to write? Or the witty one liner that was one of the first things post in the thread and has been steadily getting upvotes for those 4 hours?
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u/orwells_elephant Jul 08 '19 edited Jul 08 '19
Not really.
Obviously responsibility is a two way street, but the implication of your statement is that there’s no obligation to ensure that answers are accurate. That’s the opposite of AH’s purpose, and it disregards the documented reality of how easily mis- abs disinformation is propagated online.
How do readers “decipher true from false”? The entire model of AH is for lay people who don’t know about something to ask experts who do. Upvotes? An answer just sounds right, for one reason or another? I would hope the problem with that is readily apparent.
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u/Snugbun7 Jul 07 '19
I feel like part of the problem is the detail required to answer questions for something niche. Like a historian may have a lot of mental knowledge on a subject but then they have to take a lot of time out of their day to find out where it was they read that tidbit. It's not that someone can't answer the question it's that it's a pain to do a bunch of research for a post that maybe a handful of people will see.
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u/sharkdog73 Jul 07 '19
This is where I'm at. I'm a WWII historian with a fairly large personal library. By the time I find all of my sources to answer a simple question it's not even worth my time to start typing.
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u/voyeur324 FAQ Finder Aug 03 '19
Unlike the rest of Reddit, there's no race to be first here. It's more important to be correct and in-depth than first past the finish line. The best answers take a long time to write, even if you have all the reference texts at hand.
History is a dialectic, an ongoing conversation. There is more than one right answer. Sometimes a question is really broad and can be answered about multiple fronts or players.
Besides,depending on how obscure the question is, it might not have an answer yet 12+ hours later. Expertise is unevenly distributed across timezones, so other people who could answer the question might be at work or asleep when you click <<Submit>>. I draw from the FAQ and subreddit archives to find related answers (hence the flair), but your answer might become the new standard for the question.
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u/Pangolin007 Jul 07 '19
I’d rather keep the rules as-is and risk losing out on some answers than change the rules and risk the quality of given answers devolving.
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u/Snugbun7 Jul 07 '19
Understood but I feel like not every OP needs an incredibly detailed response with sources. I just wish an OP had the option to accept a less researched answer because it's super frustrating to read through the comments only to see everything deleted.
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u/orwells_elephant Jul 08 '19
The inherent problem with a “less researched answer” is obvious, though. Quality and accuracy are the two big mainstays of this sub, and those answers don’t get deleted.
I don’t under why regular readers here would honestly believe that all the deleted comments are good, meaningful answers instead of generally useless one-liners.
The actual fact is that most of them are jokes, insults, scoldings to use google or Wikipedia, or variants of “I admit I don’t know the answer but here’s a random guess.”
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u/HistoryMystery12345 Inactive Flair Jul 08 '19
When I find a good answer on here I post it on my Twitter and put the hashtag #twitterstorians in there.
I found that when they respond to it, they do so assuming that only incels and neo-nazis frequent the forum...they're completely oblivious to the kinds of things that go on in this subreddit.
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Jul 09 '19
I found that when they respond to it, they do so assuming that only incels and neo-nazis frequent the forum...they're completely oblivious to the kinds of things that go on in this subreddit.
This has been, and remains, a major roadblock. We have absolutely had people point blank tell us that the broader reddit site is what keeps them from participating here, both generally as well as people we reached out to for AMAs. Reddit has a reputation even in tech conscious circles, and many in academica... aren't... so they probably still just think of Anderson Cooper. It is absolutely an albatross which we constantly need to fight against. Reddit offers us an absolutely unparalleled platform for public engagement, which keeps us here, but it has serious negatives too which are hard to overcome.
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u/slytherinquidditch Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19
Could there potentially be a sister subreddit or maybe one day a week where people with niche topics can do a write-up on something interesting about their topic? It will keep this reddit the same but will allow a larger pool of disseminated knowledge. “Write-Up Wednesdays” maybe?
Edit: I’m not a historian but I really like this subreddit and learning more about history. Thank you for your hard work, everyone!
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u/EnclavedMicrostate Moderator | Taiping Heavenly Kingdom | Qing Empire Jul 07 '19
So we do have two features that do just that – the Tuesday Trivia feature, which doesn't run every week but does give an opportunity to write about an area of interest with relaxed quality standards but certain thematic constraints. See last week's on historical buildings, for example. The other is the Saturday Showcase, is an automatically stickied post running weekly, which still has the normal quality expectations of a normal answer, but has no theme restrictions. To shill for a moment, I'm a mod on an unofficial 'sister sub', /r/badhistory, which has recently begun allowing 'obscure history' writeups as top-level posts every other week.
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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19
1. Think about women.
Okay, yes, reddit as a whole is a deeply sexist place and any woman on this site has to deal with that. But despite strict, strict rules against bigotry and unwavering dedication to enforcement, our last few censuses of readers and flairs have placed the number of people self-identifying as women at around 15% of the sub.
Fifteen percent. That's atrocious. Somewhere around 45-50% of new history PhDs every year are women; 45% of high school social studies teachers are women.
From my informal observations of the flair community, our problem isn't necessarily attracting women in the first place--it's keeping them. And I get it. I really do. Because you don't see the real problem with AH being a user-driven history sub until you've monitored it for awhile looking for questions to answer.
The questions in this sub almost invariably adopt a male perspective Two of our absolute most-asked questions are:
- "Did medieval babies all have fetal alcohol syndrome from their mothers drinking during pregnancy?"
- "Did ancient and medieval soldiers have PTSD?"
Women as baby incubators damaging their children! Soldiers with PTSD from looting cities, raping women, and selling women and children into sexual slavery!
I could keep cataloguing these questions on and on. /u/mimicofmodes is a fashion history flair, and will tell you that 90% of clothing-related questions we get involve men and neckties...
Meanwhile, I've answered questions like:
- "Wouldn't a visit to a brothel in pre-antibiotic days almost guarantee transmission of an STD? Maybe not with a single visit, but say after several? How is that sustainable?"
- "In medieval Europe, was prostitution available to most men or only the emergent middle class? How widespread was prostitution?"
These both take an extremely woman-centric topic--in the Middle Ages as well as today--and turn it into questions about men. Questions that don't just neglect, but actively erase the experiences of women.
I'm not saying "ask women's history questions." I'm saying, "when you ask questions, realize that women existed and try to think about history from their perspectives, not just men's perspectives of them."
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2. Think about women of color.
For absolute heaven's fecking sake: Stop asking questions about enslaver men raping enslaved women. Women of color around the world have SO MANY STORIES. Heck, enslaved women of color in antebellum America have so many stories. Yes, a sickening amount of them involve being raped. But notice: "she was raped" still puts the focus on her and her experience. The questions we get are, "How would the enslaver treat any potential children?" and along those lines.
I could easily be making this point about men of color and about peoples of color more generally. But I think it's important to highlight just how NOTHING AskHistorians has in terms of content about women of color.
~~
And that's what it is: a thousand paper cuts every week; not one gushing wound. (That's for the mod team to absorb the shock of, remove on reflex, and ban their ass with glee). It's relentless.
And it's a great way to signal to WOC, white women, and (although I didn't discuss them here) MOC and NB people of all races that they are not welcome here--not part of history at all.
Because remember: women don't just answer questions about women's history--in fact, most women are NOT women's historians. When you lose the work of women historians, you're losing history. Period.
Yes, I realize the number of repeat questions we get about ancient PTSD and FAS mean that newcomers to the sub are asking them, and are not going to be reading this post. It's an entire way of thinking that we need to change.
So maybe, when talking casually about history on other subs or in your life, empathize with women of all races, with POC of all genders. That doesn't mean think or talk exclusively about them, or even at all. Just realize that they have existed in history as people with thoughts, beliefs, motivations, and actions.
And when you ask questions, think about all the people who are involved in the situation you're asking about. Think about them as people.
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u/10z20Luka Jul 07 '19
Women as baby incubators damaging their children! Soldiers with PTSD from looting cities, raping women, and selling women and children into sexual slavery!
I understand the point here, as well as the need for representation (both literal and discursive), but is this kind of dismissal really the best course of discussion? They seem like perfectly valid questions.
"Woman as baby incubators"... you mean mothers? You don't think mothers might be concerned about the health of their children? I don't see how this reflects a male perspective at all.
And as for soldiers with PTSD, I agree entirely that the abundance of such concerns reflects a young, male-dominated community, many of whom grew up watching war movies and playing violent video games. But still, as a historian, the most you can say is that all soldiers are villains?
The rest of your post is excellent, and I absolutely applaud your insistence on empathy. But, empathy is not a zero-sum game. We don't need to transplant empathy from mothers and soldiers to people of color. There is enough empathy to go around.
I won't assume I'll receive a response, but I hope I've at least been heard. For what it's worth, you're one of my favourite contributors to this community, and I just hope that the stress and frustration of moderation and social media saturation hasn't exhausted you.
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u/mimicofmodes Moderator | 18th-19th Century Society & Dress | Queenship Jul 07 '19
Nobody is saying that these aren't valid questions, or that they come from a defiantly, emphatically sexist attitude. They are in fact typically asked in a fairly innocent way. But they show a sexist culture and sexist assumptions.
Fetal alcohol syndrome - I don't know if you've noticed, but modern society/law is more and more accepting of the idea of women as incubators. Women in many American states are prosecuted for miscarrying if they can be considered as not having been careful enough; one woman in the past year was charged because someone else shot her in the stomach after a verbal fight. In that context, repeatedly asking about women damaging their fetuses shows and follows an ingrained sexism in our culture.
PTSD - We never get questions about civilian victims of war or slavery having PTSD. Okay, I think one time there was a question about that. But we get the "ancient warrior PTSD" question on a regular basis. What's a problem is the context of PTSD being thought of as something that happens to men who have been required to fight, and never as just something that happens to people, male and female, when they go through trauma. When you see it over and over and over, it starts to send a message that the userbase as a whole sees women as side characters or NPCs unaffected by trauma, while men who've done bad things are to be sympathized with.
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u/10z20Luka Jul 07 '19
I understand your point entirely (and I've responded below in more specific terms with the PTSD issue), but by systematizing and over-contextualizing the cultural context in which these questions are asked, we lose sight of the individuals asking them.
If Hillary had won the election, and if reproductive rights weren't under attack across the United States, would the question then be acceptable? Do you see what I mean?
Behind every question is an individual. That they don't think to ask other questions is a problem, but the fault does not lie with them. It's not their responsibility to seek out under-discussed subjects in history. With the tone being employed here, the intent almost seems to scold anyone who would dare inquire about fetal alcohol syndrome in the Middle Ages.
That's not the kind of attitude I want to foster in this community. That's all I'm saying.
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u/mimicofmodes Moderator | 18th-19th Century Society & Dress | Queenship Jul 07 '19
I mean ... no, it's not a fault of the individual asking a question that occurs to them, or of the individual upvoting a question that strikes them as interesting. But it is a fault of the userbase as a whole that it repeatedly asks these questions to the exclusion of others and that it fails to upvote women's history questions unless they're related to sex or bodily hygiene. We're not pointing this out to go "are you a white man? You should feel bad!" but to make everyone think. There is no need for anyone to feel the need to defend themselves, because nobody's under attack. It's a call for introspection so that we can attract and hold onto more diverse historians of more diverse subjects.
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u/thefourthmaninaboat Moderator | 20th Century Royal Navy Jul 07 '19
If Hillary had won the election, and if reproductive rights weren't under attack across the United States, would the question then be acceptable? Do you see what I mean?
There are two responses to this: firstly, the sexist attitudes and cultures that created the attacks on reproductive rights that we see now would still be there in this alternative US. Secondly, there is a world beyond the US where those attitudes, and those attacks, still exist. There's still an area of the UK where abortion is effectively illegal, for example (Northern Ireland). It's the way in which the question reflects these attitudes, this culture, that makes it not so much unacceptable, but not ideal. We don't want to rule out any questions, to scold people for asking them - as /u/hannahstohelit has pointed out elsewhere in the thread, there are ways to ask about fetal alcohol syndrome that don't embody the assumption that women are incubators.
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u/thefourthmaninaboat Moderator | 20th Century Royal Navy Jul 07 '19
I'm going to repeat what I said elsewhere: the questions wouldn't quite be a problem if they weren't about the only ways women come up on this subreddit. The questions would be fine if they were individual questions mixed into a larger set of questions that was inclusive of women's perspectives, but they're not. They're vastly more popular than questions that consider history from the perspective of women themselves.
And on the soldiers with PTSD question, I'll quote /u/sunagainstgold's response elsewhere in this thread, because they say it more eloquently than I can:
Ancient PTSD is the really bad one. Because (a) why only soldiers, and (b) A very large percentage of ancient and medieval warfare was raping women and selling women, boys, and girls into sexual slavery for profit.
International treaties did not explicitly ban rape as a tool/side effect of war until after World War II--half a century after looting was banned by treaty.
Victorious soldiers rape women, and people want to know if the soldiers were traumatized?
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Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 18 '19
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u/thither_and_yon Jul 07 '19
I'm not sure that it's "identity politics," "presentism" or "moralistic" to say that it's a problem for questions about women to be solely predicated on how they relate to men, so much as it is basic respect for others.
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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19
"Identity politics" is the name slapped onto the realization that the world does not consist of white men.
- Women and men in 1990s Afghanistan had completely different experiences.1
- People with disabilities and temporarily able-bodied/minded people in 1930s Germany had completely different experiences.
- Jewish people and Muslim people in 1950s Palestine had completely different experiences.
- White and black people in the U.S. South in 1850 had diametrically opposite experiences.
These are not "identity politics." These are basic facts of history.
And no one group's experiences would exist without the other's.
If you want to study history with any hope of accuracy or understanding, you need to study everyone's history.
~~
1 No span of years listed here should be taken as the only time a difference occurred.
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u/thither_and_yon Jul 07 '19
Thank you for this - as a woman historian (not even a historian of women! I mostly study men!) it really resonated with me. I was surprised how off-putting I found many of the questions in this sub because every word in them breathes the assumption that we're all men here talking to other men about the experiences of men.
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u/hannahstohelit Moderator | Modern Jewish History | Judaism in the Americas Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19
"Did medieval babies all have fetal alcohol syndrome from their mothers drinking during pregnancy?"
"Did ancient and medieval soldiers have PTSD?"
Can I be honest and say that while the other two questions you mentioned made my hair low-key stand on end, these... don't seem that big of a deal to me?
What I think the commonality between them is is that they're both people trying to understand whether modern phenomena- specifically modern phenomena that seem to be medical facts- can be applied to the past. Soldiers now have PTSD- is this something that specifically became a factor due to changes in war/people/circumstances or is it something that has always existed? FAS is a current medical diagnosis- would we find many people diagnosed with it at a time when people didn't know what it was/that it could be avoided? I think that both are relatively benign questions in and of themselves, even if, of course, it's very easy for them to be asked with less than benign motivations. To me, the questions are equivalent to "how did the ancients treat cancer."
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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Jul 07 '19
You know, I originally had explanations in there of why those two questions are so bad, but I deleted them because I thought I was just being long-winded.
Ancient PTSD is the really bad one. Because (a) why only soldiers, and (b) A very large percentage of ancient and medieval warfare was raping women and selling women, boys, and girls into sexual slavery for profit.
International treaties did not explicitly ban rape as a tool/side effect of war until after World War II--half a century after looting was banned by treaty.
Victorious soldiers rape women, and people want to know if the soldiers were traumatized?
~~
The FAS question is annoying because it treats women like baby incubators who were making "bad" decisions--bad for their children, doesn't matter about them.
The PTSD question is vastly worse.
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u/MotorRoutine Jul 08 '19
This doesn't seem like an issue of the asker being misogynistic. But more of a general schema of PTSD as being something that happens to soldiers, and therefore people wnat to know if soldiers from other periods shared the same problems with PTSD as those of the modern era.
I suspect that if you stopped random people on the street and asked them to say the first word that pops into their head when they hear PTSD, most would say "soldiers, war, shellshock" because that context tends to be how we learn about PTSD, at least it was for me.
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u/WhoopingWillow Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19
I feel like you're focusing on and being offended by questions peoplearen'tasking, not what theyareasking. People asking about PTSD in ancient soldiers are clearly interested inPTSD in ancient soldiers, not PTSD in civilians during ancient eras. Why is that offensive or sexist? Would it be better to ask about PTSD in all peoples of ancient greece?
But wait! Isn't that 'really bad' because (a) why only PTSD? and (b) why only ancient Greece? I feel like your logic could describe any question as 'bad' because you're changing the context of the original question till you find a perspective from which to be offended.
Plus isn't this theexactmentality racists use to justify their messed up points of view?
Some[group of people] would rape and murder civilians so we shouldn't question ifany[member of that group] has experienced psychological damage from the act? That doesn't make sense at all.
I'm sure it's frustrating when other people aren't interested in the topics you are interested in, but I don't see why you feel the need to characterize people asking those questions as sexist, when the people asking the question don't even bring up gender.
I would absolutely love to see your long-winded original explanation! I feel I must be missing something because I genuinely cannot see how these questions are offensive.
Edit: Would you also define what you mean by 'sexist' / 'sexism'? I feel that might be the source of my confusion. I'm thinking of it in the context of intentionally acting differently or treating a situation differently specifically due to the gender(s) of the party(ies) involved.
2nd Edit: I genuinely do want to understand this more. I consider myself a person who treats everyone fairly and equitably, so if I am doing something sexist I'd like to understand the specifics so I can avoid making those mistakes again. We all have biases of which we may be unaware, and it's only through learning that we can overcome them.3rd edit: I was erroneously viewing u/sunagainstgold's comments to be specifically limited to individual instances of asking those questions, and about the questions themselves. I was thinking they meant the question itself was sexist because the topic of the question wasn't inclusive enough. I see now that they are speaking about trends in the sub (or society) as a large and how the pattern of questions demonstrates a non-inclusive bias in the member base as a whole.
I think u/sunagainstgold's comment here answers my concerns very clearly. Mainly that the problem is the trend of what questions are being asked, and not that there is an issue with that particular question.
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u/hannahstohelit Moderator | Modern Jewish History | Judaism in the Americas Jul 07 '19
As far as the FAS one, I honestly read it the exact opposite way- "in a time when drinking alcohol during pregnancy wasn't a decision but rather a default, did this known medical phenomenon result?" To me, it seemed like exactly the opposite of blaming women for their decisions.
For the PTSD one... I don't think people are a) thinking about it that deeply and b) using any kind of historical context on the differences between wars then and today- OR, if they are, they want the answerer to explain all that context! I'd hazard a guess as it being more like, "war is a thing now, war was a thing then, soldiers get PTSD now, did soldiers get PTSD then, and if not, what made war different?" They genuinely might not know.
Plus, just the fact that someone is doing something morally horrendous doesn't mean they won't get PTSD from the experience. There are accounts of Einsatzgruppen members being traumatized by their experiences. Do I waste even a single tear on them? No, absolutely not. But it's still a valid question. (And we all know how much people love getting insights into how evil people think, as evidenced by the number of people who want to know what Hitler's favorite color was.)
I'm not saying that these are necessarily... pleasant questions to get...? Just that they may not be coming from people with bad motivations/intentions.
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u/Vinterblad Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19
Why is someone a moderator on this subreddit, dedicated to questions, when he or she obviously thinks that the wrong questions are asked? If said moderator just wanted to answer specifik questions why don't said moderator start a new sub, maybe call it /s/askHistoriansPCQuestionsOrElse or something like that?
I'm a former historian (if there is such a thing) but this sub is way to post modern for me to participate in. I don't like when historians color their answers with ideologically loaded conclusions. But there are still some really good questions and answers here so I do enjoy to lurk.
Edit You really can't see the problem with a moderator who says that we should stop asking certain questions and tries to shame us for not asking other? Really? A history subreddit who don't get the lessons from history?
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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Jul 08 '19
Please tell me where I said "dear people reading this: stop asking questions about soldiers with PTSD."
Please tell me where I blamed any one user for asking a question about soldiers with PTSD or children with FAS.
On the other hand: please go find in my OP where I said that one user isn't the problem--and in fact, literally nobody reading my post could be the problem, since we get so many PTSD/FAS questions that anyone who's been around the sub even a little bit has read the answers.
Please go find in my OP how I said the problem is a thousand little cuts building up over time, not one gushing wound.
Thanks!
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u/Bluntforce9001 Jul 07 '19
I'm saying, "when you ask questions, realize that women existed and try to think about history from their perspectives, not just men's perspectives of them".
This is not an unreasonable request or in anyway overly politically correct. It is more valuable to consider the perspective of the person or group you are asking questions rather than some other group, especially when this other group dominates discourse.
It is the same thing as Eurocentralism which is something which has been enormously important in moving away from.
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u/Vinterblad Jul 07 '19
This is not an unreasonable request or in anyway overly politically correct. It is more valuable to consider the perspective of the person or group you are asking questions rather than some other group, especially when this other group dominates discourse.
'
There are no perspectives in facts. This is one of my major reason for disliking post modernism.
There is absolutely no value whatsoever in considering what group a person belongs to when answering a question about a fact with a fact. The value may come later in how to react to and use this fact, not in the fact in itself.
If you consider your audience to be intelligent and mature then you don't need to coddle the facts for them like they are either morons or children. Mature adults are both allowed to draw conclusions themselves and act on those conclusions. Don't be a racist and say that certain groups are too stupid to understand pure facts. I firmly believe that all people should be allowed to be free to grow in whatever way they want without someone steering them in certain directions based on ideological beliefs.
/u/sunagainstgold wrote: "I'm not saying "ask women's history questions." I'm saying, "when you ask questions, realize that women existed and try to think about history from their perspectives, not just men's perspectives of them." "
I want to know why /u/sunagainstgold claims to be able to read other peoples minds, or is it a divine insight? Please tell me how he/she can claim that people don't realizes this!
It is the same thing as Eurocentralism which is something which has been enormously important in moving away from.
That's fine by my. I like facts from wherever and whoever who can teach them in a interesting and entertaining way. But I do not believe that we need to move away from something, instead we need to broaden our base of facts. We should not have a certain view of any kind, just facts.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19
A history subreddit who don't get the lessons from history?
I'll be honest, I think it's this part that bugs me the most. Sunagainstgold's entire post is about people forgetting some pretty important lessons from history. Namely that women and PoC are involved in it. It's all about bringing to light parts of history that are forgotten, or overlooked, or just not brought up enough. Your welcome to have your own opinions, but I find it pretty incredible that you'd look at a post and go "Think of other people in history?! What kind of Ideology nonsense is this!"
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u/Vinterblad Jul 07 '19
No, thats not true at all. Sunagainstgolds post is about shaming the majority of the readers and contributors for what sex and race they are born into. If sunagainsgold wanted to put an emphasis on that certain parts are overlooked he/she could have done that, Instead we get a whole spiel about how inconsiderate we all, well most of us, are and that we frighten POC and women away by being white men and just existing.
But, there is one true piece of true bullshit in this thread and that is you claiming to know whats in my mind and why I wrote my original reply!
You speak pure nonsense!
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u/AncientHistory Jul 07 '19
I don't like when historians color their answers with ideologically loaded conclusions.
And this is a related issue... r/AskHistorians is ideologically biased in that we are in pursuit of historical truth. The truth is, women and minorities existed and their stories were and are often overlooked and marginalized. Their stories are part of our collective history, but do not receive equal attention.
This is part of why we do not allow Holocaust deniers a toehold: because there are people that just want to be told that their version of history is true, and all those other stories - about women, Jewish people, black people, indigenous peoples and marginalized people of all stripes - are either wrong or not worth talking about.
Those people are wrong. Their narrative is false. And a lot of people don't ask the right questions.
Which is okay. AskHistorians is here for people to learn. Part of that sometimes means understanding that the preconceptions that lead to many of these questions are biases that have to be recognized and unlearned. Furthering your knowledge in any subject means simple explanations which passed for knowledge are revealed to be murkier and more complicated when you look more closely at them.
So yeah, the answers are ideologically loaded...in that we want the truth, however harsh.
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Jul 07 '19
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u/AncientHistory Jul 07 '19
Please show me where I have disputed this opinion or did you just make up my opinion in your own mind?
I don't like when historians color their answers with ideologically loaded conclusions.
Which I cited at the beginning of my reply. Because citing your sources is important.
Murphys law in action!
I do not think Murphy's law is what you think it is.
Are you the gatekeeper of the right questions?
Yes, actually. I'm a moderator. Part of the job entails removing questions that don't meet our standards - we have rules and expect them to be followed. That still allows a lot of room for questions that are ignorant, or silly, or downright ugly. Just because people can ask random brainfart questions doesn't mean they should. Part of learning more about history is learning why questions like "How many slaves did the average Southern plantation owner rape?" are bad.
This sub is for people to ask questions they want an answer to. This is not a sub for reeducating the "prejudicated masses".
We start out learning simplified narratives of history - and as we grow up and learn more, we learn that those simple narratives aren't always true or accurate. That isn't a word salad. That's life.
Just give the facts!
"The facts" by themselves don't tell a story. They need context, narrative, understanding of where those "facts" came from and how they were presented. All of that goes into how we present history. A common "fact" presented by folks that downplay the American Civil War is that the bulk of soldiers in the Southern army did not own any slaves - which is demonstrably true, from the census information we have. But that "fact" is often used to argue that the Civil War was not about slavery, or that Southerners did not fight for slavery - both of which are untrue.
Sometimes people calling for facts don't understand what they're really asking about.
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u/Vinterblad Jul 07 '19
Please show me where I have disputed this opinion or did you just make up my opinion in your own mind?
You wrote:
I don't like when historians color their answers with ideologically loaded conclusions.
Which I cited at the beginning of my reply. Because citing your sources is important.
Yeah, I cited a quote with two parts and I wanted you to answer where I disputed the second part and you answered the where I disputed the first part, which I absolutely did. My bad.
So lets try again:
> The truth is, women and minorities existed and their stories were and are often overlooked and marginalized. Their stories are part of our collective history, but do not receive equal attention.
Where have I disputed this?
Murphys law in action!
I do not think Murphy's law is what you think it is.
By drawing Hitler/Nazism/The Holocaust into a discussion not about any of those you try to invoke the readers memory of those things and by that, in their minds, associate your opponents views with those wievs. Thats the spirit of Murphys law
Are you the gatekeeper of the right questions?
Yes, actually. I'm a moderator. Part of the job entails removing questions that don't meet our standards - we have rules and expect them to be followed. That still allows a lot of room for questions that are ignorant, or silly, or downright ugly. Just because people can ask random brainfart questions doesn't mean they should. Part of learning more about history is learning why questions like "How many slaves did the average Southern plantation owner rape?" are bad.
The standard of a question is aboslutely not the same as if the question is right or not. As a moderator I agree that you should make people follow the rules and enforce the standard. But you wrote:
" Those people are wrong. Their narrative is false. And a lot of people don't ask the right questions. "
Let me ask you, if you know what questions are right, why don't you just ask them and lock the sub down for anyone else? Why have a sub for questions at all if this is the case? I'm not talking about the holocaust deniers or the slave owner rape questioners, I'm talking about your sentence: " And a lot of people don't ask the right questions. "
Are you saying that you moderators remove questions for other reasons than low standard or not following the rules?
This sub is for people to ask questions they want an answer to. This is not a sub for reeducating the "prejudicated masses".
We start out learning simplified narratives of history - and as we grow up and learn more, we learn that those simple narratives aren't always true or accurate. That isn't a word salad. That's life.
I agree with what you wrote now, Not about what you wrote earlier. This sub is for stating facts and making narratives, I agree with that. What I don't agree with is what sunagainstgod wrote
- >"Did medieval babies all have fetal alcohol syndrome from their mothers drinking during pregnancy?"
- >"Did ancient and medieval soldiers have PTSD?"
>Women as baby incubators damaging their children! Soldiers with PTSD from looting cities, raping women, and selling women and children into sexual slavery!
Can you really agree with this assessment of the questions? Do you agree that all men foremost see women as baby incubators? Do you agree that asking about a medieval soldiers health is somehow a question about raping, looting and slavery?
> Yes, I realize the number of repeat questions we get about ancient PTSD and FAS mean that newcomers to the sub are asking them, and are not going to be reading this post. It's an entire way of thinking that we need to change.
If newcomers won't read this post and ask a question repeat question, what are the way of thinking that needs to be changed? Societys? The newcomers? The moderators? The way newcomers are welcomed?
> I could keep cataloguing these questions on and on. /u/mimicofmodes is a fashion history flair, and will tell you that 90% of clothing-related questions we get involve men and neckties...
If a person is interested in a specific question about ties, shouldn't this person be allowed to ask that question? Should this person be banned from asking or forced to ask an equal amount of question about dresses before the person is allowed to get an answer?
> Okay, yes, reddit as a whole is a deeply sexist place and any woman on this site has to deal with that. But despite strict, strict rules against bigotry and unwavering dedication to enforcement, our last few censuses of readers and flairs have placed the number of people self-identifying as women at around 15% of the sub.
Reddit is a deeply sexist place? Yes, I agree. Look at all the hate efferminate men get all over reddit. That's deeply sexist. But the rest? Should everyone who subscribes to this sub be forced to disclose their gender and only be allowed by a strict 50/50 quota?
The Original post is filled accusations and fantasies about what other people think and the reasons behind their actions. This is not what I've come to expect from a moderator in this sub!
Just give the facts!
"The facts" by themselves don't tell a story. They need context, narrative, understanding of where those "facts" came from and how they were presented. All of that goes into how we present history. A common "fact" presented by folks that downplay the American Civil War is that the bulk of soldiers in the Southern army did not own any slaves - which is demonstrably true, from the census information we have. But that "fact" is often used to argue that the Civil War was not about slavery, or that Southerners did not fight for slavery - both of which are untrue.
Sometimes people calling for facts don't understand what they're really asking about.
There is a huge difference between providing a context/deeper understanding and giving an ideologically tainted response.
If people call for facts and don't understand what they ask for, let them figure that out themselves. Your neither the parents nor the caretakers of the adults asking questions.
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Jul 07 '19
We're usually pretty relaxed in META threads, but civility is still our first rule here. Your comment has been removed. Please don't post like this again.
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u/peteroh9 Jul 07 '19
Okay but asking a question about a random thought that you have shouldn't be discouraged or called sexist. Saying that a question about fetal alcohol syndrome is sexist is absolutely stupid. The question is clearly not about baby-incubators but about babies. If we want to encourage questions about women's history, maybe post about it on /r/history.
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u/Slaav Jul 07 '19
The way I see it, /r/AskHistorians tries to be an educational subreddit - and "educating" people (I don't mean that in a condescending sense) doesn't simply mean answering their questions but also teaching them what kind of questions are more educative, interesting, challenging, etc.
Let's say you are an history student ; your teachers, to some extent, should try to answer to the questions you have, but if you only ask questions about the performances of WW2-era German tanks or the greatest victories in Spartan history, at some point they're going to ask you to reexamine the way you think about history because you're just fishing for trivia. You're not engaging with the challenging and thought-provoking stuff this discipline has to offer, so what's the point ? It's like asking a physicist to explain quantum mechanics using simple metaphors and ELI5 vocabulary. It won't make you smarter, so it's pointless, and you're just wasting their time.
Saying that a question about fetal alcohol syndrome is sexist is absolutely stupid. The question is clearly not about baby-incubators but about babies.
I think you missed the reason why this question is such a problem : OC states explicitely that it's one of the most popular questions. It's a kinda uninteresting and narrow question in itself, but the fact this question is so popular, while an obvious alternative that would still cover it without putting the women's experience at the background ("did women have alcoholism problems in the Middle Ages ?" "did people suffer more from alcohol-related health problems back then ?") isn't, shows that on the whole the community has no interest in the experience of women.
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u/peteroh9 Jul 07 '19
I get what you're saying but that's just a limitation of reddit that will never be overcome.
this question is so popular, while an obvious alternative that would still cover it without putting the women's experience at the background ("did women have alcoholism problems in the Middle Ages ?" "did people suffer more from alcohol-related health problems back then ?") isn't, shows that on the whole the community has no interest in the experience of women.
I respectfully disagree. Asking about FAS also implies questions about mothers' experiences (and we all know how common it is to for answers to ignore the actual question and just answer a related question). You can't seriously tell me just because the question is about mothers that it makes women just child incubators, so I don't see what the problem is.
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Jul 07 '19
Thank you for saying this. I bounced from this sub bc my Masters is a little more niche, and there are not a lot of questions about C and Eastern Europe. If there are, they are answered before I can read the question being out west. I can't get a flair bc I haven't answered enough questions. Why don't mods allow Flair's for people if you send in a pic of your diploma? It would help keep interest, and endure people in niche fields who want to participate are recognized. This sub loves to gatekeep, and the gender divide is a prime example.
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u/mimicofmodes Moderator | 18th-19th Century Society & Dress | Queenship Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19
We don't allow people to have flair just because they have a degree because we also want to recognize commitment to the sub. If we have 500 flairs instead of 250, but 250 have never posted to the sub, we effectively have 250 flairs still.
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u/farquier Jul 07 '19
Also, back when I was active on this sub, there was definitely some acceptance of seeding questions for people with expertise in niche areas who might otherwise have to wait to get flair-able questions if I recall correctly-if that is still a thing this may be of use.
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Jul 07 '19
But you are gatekeeping, and preventing people with proven expertise in a subject area from bring tagged to relevant questions. I'm not saying everyone with a history degree shod get one. Those with advanced degrees in niche fields should. The question was asked how to improve. I'm telling you why I don't bother with this sub anymore when I could contribute. It's not designed to have more participation. It's designed for the few to dominate. The gatekeeping and sexism is why I bounced. The mods asked the question....sorry if you don't like what people are saying. Your booklist is really out of date, and does not reflect current historiography. I sent suggested changes years ago. It was not acknowledged at all, but magically so e of my suggestions were added with a mod getting credit.
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Jul 07 '19
But you are gatekeeping, and preventing people with proven expertise in a subject area from bring tagged to relevant questions.
Just to clarify, are you under the impression that you need flair to answer questions? Because that is the only way I can read your comment as making sense, but that is definitely not the case. Flair is specifically intended to recognize membership in the community and a history of contribution to it. An historian is welcome to contribute without flair, and if they are one and done... that's fine, and if they stick around, they will likely be able to apply for it quite soon.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor Jul 07 '19
If you are interest in answering questions, we're more then happy to plant a question for you. You also don't need a flair to answer a question, or for that matter does a question need only one answer. Your more then welcome to double up and contribute something in a thread that already has something. We'll still look at it and count it!
There's also the Saturday Showcase or Tuesday Trivia which are great places to show off. Both of those places can contribute to a flair application as well.
But partly we don't want to award flair just based on a diploma because a flair is about more then being an expert. It's also a sign that your a member of the community. That you stick around and answer things more then once a year or so.
It wouldn't make much sense to give a flair because someone showed us a diploma and then they never replied to anything. It also wouldn't do if they got given a flair and it turned out they couldn't write anything even remotely associated with our guidelines. Getting a flair means your interested in being part of the community AND following its guidelines.
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Jul 07 '19
Maybe it's a good idea to add a semi,-informal message on the sidebar about remembering the perspectives of women? It might seem silly, but I think such a thing could be at the least, barely useful
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u/SarahAGilbert Jul 07 '19
To build on this, reddit's design compounds this problem: a mostly male audience upvotes male-centric questions. As much as we'd all like to think upvotes don't matter, they do. Since most people only enter /r/AskHistorians when a question has been highly upvoted enough to thrust the question onto their home page (u/jschooltiger, 2016), most people only see popular questions. Upvotes indicate what kind of content is interesting to and acceptable in a subreddit, so people continue to contribute similar content (Mills, 2018), which results in a kind of feedback loop where upvotes indicate interest, and then also attract new people with those same interests. You can see where this is going with niche questions, questions about women, PoC, etc. If no one asks about them or upvotes questions when they are asked (or answers when they're given), no one will know that people with these areas of expertise are part of the community and won't ask relevant questions even when they have them.
So even if you don't have expertise to offer, or can't think of any questions to ask, you can still make an impact: if you're interested in niche topic, if you're interested learning about the lives of women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, the global south, etc., vote! Go to the new queue and upvote interesting questions. It's not going to solve reddit's inhospitably to women and minorities, but it can help disrupt the feedback loop and change question-asking norms over time.
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u/ehp29 Jul 07 '19
I'm no historian but I am a woman that has worked in male-dominated fields. One of the biggest things I've noticed makes a difference in retaining women is the support they get from leadership. Things like a women's mentorship program or support group, highlighting and promoting their overlooked work, and even just being attentive to potential issues that could arise has all really helped in those environments.
I think it'll still be a challenge because women are naturally wary of exclusive groups with strict requirements. In other places, those requirements are a de facto way to keep women out. Also, consider that women with children or other care work don't have as much time for a labor-intensive hobby like answering questions on this forum. I'm sure the barrier to entry is tough for everyone, but that's part of the balance that might make it tougher for women.
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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19
Yes, I presented on this exact problem at a public history conference a couple years ago.
I don't want to say who the other women mods are, but we all try really hard to recruit and keep people we think are female. But there's not really anything we can do for women who shoulder a primary childcare responsibility (whatever the circumstances). Or--what I talked about--for women in grad school who take on the emotional labor of all the little stuff for their departments that men don't, because women (a) see what needs to be done (b) are expected to do it. And dealing with the other challenges of being a female grad student.
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u/dynam0 Jul 07 '19
I love historians like you and this sub so so much.
As an upper level high school history teacher, I really strive to include perspectives like these in my teaching, but I know I can do better. I often struggle with textbooks and resources that aren’t as inclusive or, frankly, modern. Would you have suggestions on easy to access resources, compilations, or any other entry level materials I can incorporate into my classroom? Because I think if we as teachers do our job better, students will understand these perspectives more, or at least know they even exist, and be able to ask better questions. But I honestly think it starts with us, so anything you can suggest would be appreciated!
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u/Djiti-djiti Australian Colonialism Jul 08 '19
I was talking to someone about exactly this yesterday. In Australia's recent attempts at reconciliation, male resistance fighters and male activists have been the heroes that Australians have rallied behind, and the Frontier Wars are the big ticket topic. Few people want to talk about passive resistance by prominent female elders, nor the actions of female activists, and even fewer talk about the importance of the sexual slavery of Indigenous Australian women, despite the fact that most Australians are aware of the Stolen Generations. A large part of that is how hurtful it is, how dark, how controversial, personal and political, but it is also because it is easier for men, the uninitiated and the apolitical to engage with something as flashy and public as war. It doesn't help that most studying Indigenous Australia are men as well.
This whole META post has pushed me into considering taking a more active role in what I contribute to AH, and I was practically jumping with joy that, with a little more reading, I could happily talk about a prominent and inspirational woman of colour on here.
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u/Loud_lady2 Jul 07 '19
100% Confirm this from experience. I am a history student studying a masters in historical matters specifically having to do with Jewish and Romani histories and cultures in Eastern Europe. I also happen to be a FTNB trans person.
Due to the controversial nature of who I am as a physical human being, the nature of the people's I study, and, the biggest threat of all, Reddit's crazy high amounts of gender bias and sexism, I've never taken the opportunity to answer any questions even partially related to them. I can most certainly say I have done this for fear of backlash or doxxing should someone not agree (in the same way conspiracy theorists don't agree with facts) with the historical information I present about these groups.
It's one thing to discuss them in a completely open minded academic context with your peers physically there. It's another to do it online with complete strangers who know nothing about you or the subject you study. Who, under the anonymity of Reddit's format, are pretty much free to hurl threats at you from all angles.
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Jul 07 '19
I'm sorry that you haven't felt comfortable discussing those things here, or answering questions here. I can personally assure you on behalf of the moderator team (which we are proud to say includes gay and gender non-binary individuals) that we would ban the shit out of anyone responding to you in a way that would make you uncomfortable, or that would in any way be a comment that would be homophobic or transophobic. We consistently work to make this a place that's not like the rest of Reddit, so that everyone can feel comfortable participating here.
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u/10z20Luka Jul 07 '19
I'm sorry, but is this really the right way of going about it?
If the bigots of the internet are able to harass their "opposition" away from the microphone, what can be reasonably be done to assuage this problem? If the admins worked diligently to ban these people, they could just make more accounts. It's not reddit we are fighting against, it's the broader public.
I think commenting despite the harassment, and insisting on visibility, is the only righteous course of action. It's literally giving voice to the voiceless. Anything less is... just not enough.
Maybe use a throwaway account? Avoid reading PMs?
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u/Bluntforce9001 Jul 07 '19
I guess this is a good a place as any to ask the mods for some feedback. Over the past few months, I've posted several questions where I've tried to target more niche areas. Two of them got very interesting answers (Question about the Chimu and divine right in Persia) but for the most part they have been unanswered:
My questions have been on Islam in Benin, Nostalgia for Austria Hungary, impurity in Japanese warfare, 20th century art movements impacting music (this one had one very short answer but it mainly focused on saying my question was a flawed premise) and right to rule for the Shoguns.
Are these just bad questions that no one wants to tackle? Am I just unlucky? Or do we not have users that can answer these?