I wish I could build a career out of writing crazy what if Hitler fanfiction  .
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Mar 16, 2014 19:33
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I've got a question about historiography. What exactly is the distinction between academic and popular histories? I feel like I know a popular history when I see one, but I'm never quite sure why it's one and not the other. What makes something academic? Is it the use of a certain citation style, the author's credentials, or the work being peer reviewed?
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Mar 16, 2014 20:23
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On ship names, there's the HMS Mimi and HMS Toutout, which means 'meow', and 'woof' in French slang. Their original names were "Cat" and "Dog". The guy who named them was a bit of a weirdo, to put it mildly. He had a lot of hosed-up tattoos he liked to show his subordinates.
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Mar 16, 2014 20:34
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brozozo posted:I've got a question about historiography. What exactly is the distinction between academic and popular histories? I feel like I know a popular history when I see one, but I'm never quite sure why it's one and not the other. What makes something academic? Is it the use of a certain citation style, the author's credentials, or the work being peer reviewed? In my experience it's details. Popular histories tend to try and create a fairly narrative flow to the whole thing, because that's what will hold your interest. Academic histories will provide a brief outline of some events (and often assume that you know the general overview), then launch itself into lengthy discussions as to exactly what, and exactly why, those events occurred.
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Mar 16, 2014 20:39
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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brozozo posted:I've got a question about historiography. What exactly is the distinction between academic and popular histories? I feel like I know a popular history when I see one, but I'm never quite sure why it's one and not the other. What makes something academic? Is it the use of a certain citation style, the author's credentials, or the work being peer reviewed? Footnotes/Endnotes in the text are a sure sign of academic history. Any decent academic history is also discussing the historiography of the topic at least to some degree, even if it is just "nothing has been written about this". Popular histories usually only have a a bibliography at the end, without citing every single work used at the exact spot where it is used. And most popular historians don't go too deep into the historiography of the topic because it can be dry as gently caress. Or if you ask an academic, any history book on the topic of his choosing that sells more than his is popular and shoddy workmanship, at best.
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Mar 16, 2014 20:41
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Obdicut posted:On ship names, there's the HMS Mimi and HMS Toutout, which means 'meow', and 'woof' in French slang. Their original names were "Cat" and "Dog". I have a feeling he was the type of man who'd get that lewd lady tattoo on his bicep. You know. The one that suggestively moves. I want to hear more about this man myself now...
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Mar 16, 2014 20:56
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A Spanish guy tried to convince me Pearl Harbor was an inside job once, I just thought he was eccentric but maybe the idea is more widespread in Spanish language media than in the anglosphere? 
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Mar 16, 2014 21:21
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Azran posted:This is the best quote: Thank God this dude died in '71. Cannot imagine being hounded for the last years of my life by someone convinced I was literally Hitler. brozozo posted:I've got a question about historiography. What exactly is the distinction between academic and popular histories? I feel like I know a popular history when I see one, but I'm never quite sure why it's one and not the other. What makes something academic? Is it the use of a certain citation style, the author's credentials, or the work being peer reviewed? ArchangeI has it right in that footnotes are a big sign. Popular histories also tend to (but not always) be narrative, while academic histories tend to be analytical. That said, I've made use of some pop history stuff for essays in undergraduate (Desmond Seward's books, specifically) but only in a very limited capacity.
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Mar 16, 2014 21:27
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Squalid posted:A Spanish guy tried to convince me Pearl Harbor was an inside job once, I just thought he was eccentric but maybe the idea is more widespread in Spanish language media than in the anglosphere? Conspiracy theories are depressingly common beliefs worldwide. I think like 50% of Afghanis thought that 9/11 was an inside job so that America could invade them to get their... opium?
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Mar 16, 2014 21:28
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:ArchangeI has it right in that footnotes are a big sign. Popular histories also tend to (but not always) be narrative, while academic histories tend to be analytical. That said, I've made use of some pop history stuff for essays in undergraduate (Desmond Seward's books, specifically) but only in a very limited capacity.
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Mar 16, 2014 21:33
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Obdicut posted:On ship names, there's the HMS Mimi and HMS Toutout, which means 'meow', and 'woof' in French slang. Their original names were "Cat" and "Dog". I've got a copy of Warship 2013 handy, so let's talk about some oddly-named French battleships ! We've seen some strange ship names, but only the French would name their new battleship class after philosophers; Danton, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Condorcet, Diderot, and Voltaire. These would be the response to the Dreadnought. They screwed it up. Here's a picture, notice the six overlarge secondary battery turrets.  Faced with the Dreadnought, the Marine Navale decided to lay down a half a dozen of what can most charitably be described as semi-Dreadnoughts. The Dantons would, eventually, have turbine propulsion but would compromise on a mixed armament. 4 12" and 12 9.7" (4x 305mm and 12x240mm). Despite the turbines, they were a little slow. Two of the ships broke 20 knots on trials, but the other four only made 19 and a fraction even on trials. Fire control would be adequate and planned on the director system. The armor scheme was overly complex and designed for short range combat, it would be ineffective in a long-range engagement with an all-big gun ship. The turrets were poorly protected and any opponent with 12" guns would disarm a Danton with ease; possibly causing magazine explosions and certainly severe fires. The mixed armament wasn't the worst feature of these ships. The 4 305mm and 6 240mm broadside had a slightly heavier throw weight than the Dreadnought (5280kg to 4632kg), and both guns had similar ranges (over 14,000m). You would still suffer from shell spotting issues and that would inevitable reduce accuracy overall. Worse, the 240mm guns might not penetrate at long range.  The biggest problem was poor mechanical design and commonality between sister ships. One dockyard counted 5 separate types of ventilator in use, this creates logistical and training issues. Reliability was poor, they were expensive to operate and spent very little time at sea. There's another training issue. The first of these monstrosities was laid down in June of 1907, 5 were completed by August 1911 and the last in December of that same year. They were built too late. Against the last of the pre-Dreadnoughts from England and Germany they would have fared very well (unless the predread had director controlled gunnery). Faced with a modern dreadnought they would have been destroyed at long range, and would have been too slow to run away. And there you have one of my contenders for worst warships of the 20th century. Let's close with the gem of my GIS for this class. 
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Mar 16, 2014 21:46
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Conspiracy theories are depressingly common beliefs worldwide. I think like 50% of Afghanis thought that 9/11 was an inside job so that America could invade them to get their... opium? "Someone who lives over the border in the neighboring country arranged to kill a few thousand of our people so we are invading you and overthrowing your whole government who are kinda tangentially linked to this guy in the sense that they like each other and installing some other guys in their place who have nothing to do with any of this whatsoever." You wouldn't buy that either.
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Mar 16, 2014 21:48
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Where is that last image from ? The French ships one. Can you get prints of that?
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Mar 16, 2014 21:53
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Saint Celestine posted:Where is that last image from ? The French ships one. Can you get prints of that? You can have the original for forty bucks http://www.old-print.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?item=LIL1911103T I'm on a roll, I'm writing up a French AC that was even worse. Have a teaser. 
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Mar 16, 2014 21:59
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A year or two after 9/11 I was on a flight out of New York and ended up sitting next to a guy who worked at Brunei's embassy to the UN. He spent the flight telling me exactly how Mossad had carried the whole thing out, including how they told all the jews working in the buildings not to come into work that day. In short, theories like this are extremely common around the world, even among well educated people. Though, to be fair, western countries have done all kinds of lovely things for lovely reasons (e.g. Iraq), it's just that in the case of Afghanistan the motive was simple lust for revenge.
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Mar 16, 2014 22:00
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I thought Afghanistan was invaded to satisfy internal American political pressures and that most of the people calling the shots were well aware that it wouldn't achieve anything RE winning the war on terror/finding bin laden?
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Mar 16, 2014 22:17
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Slavvy posted:I thought Afghanistan was invaded to satisfy internal American political pressures and that most of the people calling the shots were well aware that it wouldn't achieve anything RE winning the war on terror/finding bin laden? http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/leo_strauss%27_philosophy_of_deception
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Mar 16, 2014 22:27
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Now the Danton class was bad because it left the French with a really terrible battle line. Here’s a ship that was just bad. Really bad. And guess what ? It’s another French ship ! The Dupuy de Lome was an armored cruiser. Ironically, she was named after the French naval architect who designed the Gloire (and the world’s first electric submarine). Intended to honor the man, it would turn into a professional insult. As the first armored cruiser rather than a follow on series to a foreign competitor like the Dantons, the Dupuy de Lome has more of an excuse to be a poor design. But not this much. French warships of the late 19th century often had unusual hull forms. They would be much beamier at the waterline than at the deck level. To quote wikipedia, "In ship designing, the tumblehome is the narrowing of a ship's hull with greater distance above the water-line. Expressed more technically, it is present when the beam at the uppermost deck is less than the maximum beam of the vessel." It looks like this  or this  What the French wanted was a powerful ship with a long range for attacking trade, English trade of course. What they got was a white elephant that had to be rebuilt once in its short service life of only 15 years, short even by the standards of the time. Worse, and I say that a lot, she was unstable, slow, and poorly armored. Her armament would be exceeded by later armored cruisers, but for the time she had an adequate and well-protected battery. There, I said something nice about her. She was designed under the same guiding philosophy as Fisher's battlecruisers: fast enough to run away from anything she can't sink, strong enough to kill anything she can catch. Naturally there were huge problems with her engines. Problems with the boilers delayed her completion by two years. She was intended for a top speed of 20 knots, but couldn't hit that even in trials. Those completion delays got expensive, she was laid down in 1888 and only launched in 1905. The English were building battleships in 3 years, even without the delay that would have been slow. So what did they get when she entered service ? This beast.  2 194mm (7.6") guns in single turrets fore and aft, and six 164mm (6.4") guns in single turrets, 3 on each broadside. As far as things go, having all your guns under armor was a significant step up from the usual trade protection cruiser of the day, who would probably have 4 or 6" guns in open mounts. Unfortunately for the Marine Nationale those light ships could run away, and heavier and faster ships were soon under construction by every significant foreign navy, even the Russians. They were well protected. 100mm of curved steel plate can keep out a lot of smaller shells, and there were protective decks, cleverly placed coal bunkers, and other protective measures. Unfortunately her armor plate was somewhat defective. A later armored cruiser would have handled her easily, and a 6" gun light cruiser could inflict real damage when they came in service. They would have a fairly short window of utility in terms of hitting power and armor. Not unexpected in that era, but unusually short and since the ship was too slow, of no use at all. Kinda handsome though.  The engines were a problem her whole career. The first set had one tube burst on her first trials, injuring 16 crewmen. She never made her designed speed. The Dupuy de Lome did manage to make some foreign port visits, escorting but not carrying French dignitaries (she had a nasty roll until she was reconstructed). There is no indication she ever got further from France than Portugal or Russia, a transatlantic voyage would have been a good test for a commerce raider, but so far as I can tell she never spent much time out at sea. Here she is post-refit. You can see from the six funnels that she still had a lot of boilers placed in two separate boiler rooms. Cranes for boat handling were added and a few incidental improvements were made.  And another "before" picture.  The refit took four years, completely replaced her machinery, and left her a knot slower before. What was slow in 1895 was suicidally poor performance in 1906 when the refit finished. She went into reserve after the refit, was activated for troubles in Morocco and decommissioned again as the rustbucket she had become. Peru ended up buying her in 1912, but never made all the payments and she went for scrap in 1918. What a waste of good steel; not counting the foreign-made armor plating. This concludes our tour of the lowlights of French naval construction.
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Mar 16, 2014 22:49
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Sadly I can't make sense of your post because the forums tripping balls cuts off the right hand side of your text.
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Mar 16, 2014 23:12
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Great Article  Can you show us some of the highlights of the french navy, I'm particually curious about two ships Gloire and frances interwar aircraft carrier whose name escapes me.
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Mar 16, 2014 23:15
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Ferrosol posted:Great Article They put the Bearn into service, and they had another under construction. I have an article on those efforts handy. The Gloire deserves some study as well.
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Mar 16, 2014 23:20
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Slavvy posted:Sadly I can't make sense of your post because the forums tripping balls cuts off the right hand side of your text. It's the thread's fault for angering Argentinian Hitler's ghost.
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Mar 16, 2014 23:33
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Slavvy posted:I thought Afghanistan was invaded to satisfy internal American political pressures and that most of the people calling the shots were well aware that it wouldn't achieve anything RE winning the war on terror/finding bin laden? The US Govt firmly believed bin Laden was at Tora Bora and the battle of 12-17 Dec 2001 was a sincere, albeit blundered attempt to capture him. Where have you read different? I also think you underestimate how unprepared the Bush administration was to fight the war, and how idealistic their policies were. Part of the reason they were so blase about going into Iraq was that they had assumed Afghanistan was a victory.
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Mar 17, 2014 02:14
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I'm relentlessly anal about safety when loading and firing, and this gif (don't know where it's from, I found it in D&D's pictures thread) is why:
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Mar 17, 2014 02:31
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It's from Ukraine.
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Mar 17, 2014 02:32
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steinrokkan posted:It's from Ukraine. Thank you. Imagine several pounds of black powder behind that thing and always hold the ramrod safely. If firing black powder weaponry is a concern of yours, of course.
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Mar 17, 2014 02:36
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What's he actually firing? Is it a home made firework rocket thing?
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Mar 17, 2014 02:40
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He's shooting one of those stick-mounted fireworks at police. The part that gets lit is on the front of the stick and gets pushed towards the front of the launch tube after ignition. So he's not pushing a ramrod, he's loading the actual projectile into the launcher. One of the guys in the background is holding a big bundle of them.
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Mar 17, 2014 02:43
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:The US Govt firmly believed bin Laden was at Tora Bora and the battle of 12-17 Dec 2001 was a sincere, albeit blundered attempt to capture him. Where have you read different? I.e., never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Also, yeah, it's pretty well established that OBL was in Afghanistan from before 9/11 until the end of 2001. The battle in/around Tora Bora at the end of the year was a well intentioned but poorly resourced and poorly executed attempt to capture him.
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Mar 17, 2014 02:48
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mllaneza posted:French ships Great write-ups, and I don't know about anyone else, but I think tumblehome designs are pretty and charming in their own way, especially Imperial Russian battleships. Anyway, French fleet actions in WWI: Were there any of note? I think the only time I've ever heard them mentioned was that they missed a potential debacle with the Goeben and Breslau and never again until the French wanted to snag some surrendered KMS dreadnoughts in 1919.
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Mar 17, 2014 02:51
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Slavvy posted:I thought Afghanistan was invaded to satisfy internal American political pressures and that most of the people calling the shots were well aware that it wouldn't achieve anything RE winning the war on terror/finding bin laden? The invasion of Afghanistan actually made a certain degree of sense because the Taliban was a state sponsor of Al Qaeda and that did constitute a strategic problem that we had good reasons to want to resolve after 9/11. Also you shouldn't overrate the cynicism/awareness of the people in the Bush administration who were in charge of making that call. I remember them being criticized by Mideast experts back then because they had this tendency to talk about Al Qaeda as if Al Qaeda's objectives were a real problem to be confronted as opposed to the millenarian fantasies that they are. I would say that the neoconservatives and Al Qaeda both shared the belief that we were in a clash of civilizations and they were at the tipping point of history, and if that sounds insane it's only because it is. The Machiavellian puppetmaster is a stock character in fiction but IRL people mostly believe their own bullshit. That is, they believed that there was a War on Terror that could be won, and absolutely had to be won. In that sense it was imperative to invade Afghanistan and crush not only Al Qaeda but also the Taliban, because they were really just two heads of the Islamist (also known to morons as "Islamofascist") hydra. There's also the really brute level that Tom Friedman was getting at when he wrote: quote:Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business. Friedman was entirely serious about this, and he's the definition of an elite opinion-making columnist. So I would say Afghanistan was invaded at least in part because the people running the USA believed at least somewhat that they were living at the end of history and it was necessary to the triumph of Western Civilization over backward Asiatic Superstition, and also because it made them feel like real tough guys. One of the things that you can learn from getting deep into history is that sometimes really important people with enormous power and responsibility are just bad at their jobs and/or shockingly ignorant. The go-to example in A/T history threads has been Hitler and his inner circle, and that ground is well-trodden, but there's no shortage of case studies. That aside, there were some good reasons to invade Afghanistan. In terms of restoring public confidence, which in spite of being illogical and emotional is a real and important thing, the USA had to be shown to be reacting effectively and punishing the people who had attacked it. Additionally it went a long way towards preventing another attack, because it did crush Al Qaeda's operational strength. That's referring to the invasion, though; the occupation has been an absurdly expensive boondoggle and we'd have been better off finding our way out a decade ago.
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Mar 17, 2014 03:00
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EvanSchenck posted:One of the things that you can learn from getting deep into history is that sometimes really important people with enormous power and responsibility are just bad at their jobs and/or shockingly ignorant. David Lloyd-George! I would chuckle whenever an example of his terrible sense of geography was mentioned, then immediately afterwards slowly sigh as it sunk in that this was a guy who was literally deciding the sociopolitical fates of hundreds of thousands of people.
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Mar 17, 2014 03:04
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I think it's safe to say a great percentage of Afghan civilians didn't even know what 9/11 was let alone whether it was a conspiracy or not. There were interviews of older people who thought that US troops were the Soviets back for another go around.
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Mar 17, 2014 03:34
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Squalid posted:A Spanish guy tried to convince me Pearl Harbor was an inside job once, I just thought he was eccentric but maybe the idea is more widespread in Spanish language media than in the anglosphere? I wonder if that's a Latin America thing? Since they've had the most experience with America being an imperialist dick head, they probably have a better excuse than anyone for believing such things. Slim Jim Pickens posted:Conspiracy theories are depressingly common beliefs worldwide. I think like 50% of Afghanis thought that 9/11 was an inside job so that America could invade them to get their... opium? I'm pretty sure most Afghanis don't (or didn't, they probably do now) know what even 9/11 was. You're talking about a very rural country, that had been in a civil war for 30 years, had been bombed to poo poo multiple times, and the better part of which was ruled by people that outlawed all foreign media.
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Mar 17, 2014 04:57
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PittTheElder posted:I'm pretty sure most Afghanis don't (or didn't, they probably do now) know what even 9/11 was. You're talking about a very rural country, that had been in a civil war for 30 years, had been bombed to poo poo multiple times, and the better part of which was ruled by people that outlawed all foreign media. Yep. Here's an article from a few years back on the subject. The Wall Street Journal posted:Mr. Ghattar stared blankly when asked whether he knew about al Qaeda's strike on the U.S., launched a decade ago from Afghan soil.
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Mar 17, 2014 05:05
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:Yep. Here's an article from a few years back on the subject. Oh, that's actually the article that I was sort of remembering. 50% of Afghanis interviewed in that article believe 9/11 to be an inside job.
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Mar 17, 2014 05:59
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I don't know where you're getting that from said article:quote:According to a survey of 15- to 30-year-old men in the two southern provinces where President Barack Obama sent the bulk of American surge troops, 92% of respondents said they didn't know about "this event which the foreigners call 9/11" after being read a three-paragraph description of the attacks.
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Mar 17, 2014 06:36
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PittTheElder posted:I don't know where you're getting that from said article: I was just joking man, one of two quoted Afghanis thought 9/11 was an inside job. That really is the article I was thinking of when I made my first post, but I'd gotten the details completely wrong.
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Mar 17, 2014 06:52
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PittTheElder posted:I wonder if that's a Latin America thing? Since they've had the most experience with America being an imperialist dick head, they probably have a better excuse than anyone for believing such things. I'm not an expert in South American political history, by all means; but I would say it's got something to do with this. If you look at the most, uh, outspoken leaders in South America they tend to poo poo on imperialism constantly. I've seen the Falklands War being compared to the First Indochina War of 1946 and the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 by journalists and historians alike. V  V Now, if you ask a random person on the street about current X situation involving the US, they will say something akin to "Oh, those Americans are up to no good. X was an inside job all along!" I don't even know what's the current popular opinion regarding whether or not Osama Bin Laden is dead or not but ugh.
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Mar 17, 2014 07:46
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I'm currently fascinated by Battle Cruisers: I understand at the moment why they were originally created (they were intended to prevent commerce raiding by armored cruisers) and they did well in that particular job (see the battle of the Falklands), but why were they used in Jutland in a role they were never intended to take? Were any battle-cruisers built post WWI and if so, why and what were their intended roles post-Jutland, since they proved to be a liability when placed in fleet battles?
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Mar 17, 2014 07:54
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