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HEY GAL posted:This is one of the legal books of the regiment I study (there are three), which have records of all the legal things that happened in that regiment. It's mostly trials, but it also has dying people making their wills, people owing each other money, and notes that deserters left when they deserted. The lines you're looking at say: My field was print. When people asked me why I chose that area, I tell them I love intersection of commerce and art. Really, I just failed hard at paleography. gently caress manuscripts. Edit: Massive respect for anyone who can bother to look at those hosed up documents.
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Dec 6, 2015 00:10
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Mr Enderby posted:gently caress manuscripts. manuscripts are real, and strong, and my friend HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Dec 6, 2015 |
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Dec 6, 2015 00:19
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Phobophilia posted:its okay, cippalippus somehow thinks that it will all be solved by just siding with the shia yes Since we're having weird meta-discussions anyway I've was thinking about the the nature of History itself. Is History a science? I say the answer is an unambiguous yes, or rather I mean History should be investigated scientifically. I don't mean History in the broad sense either, which would include archaeology and other fields I don't think anyone would argue must use scientific methods. I mean specifically the study of written and archival material is a scientific endeavor. Anyone disagree?
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Dec 6, 2015 00:34
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HEY GAL posted:Counterpoint: a manuscript is the only opportunity I will ever have to, as it were, reach out and touch my subjects' hands. Sometimes the sand is still in the documents and it gets everywhere, even into my hair--I'll scratch my head at the end of the day and come away with sand under my fingernails. Sometimes the musterschreiber used so much ink by accident that sand is still embedded in the words, and it glitters. The entire page will glitter. I found a sheet of paper covered in tears once. A colleague of mine found a wine-soaked playing card stuck between the pages of a French military trial document, but he told the archivist about it and the archivist pocketed it. In some muster rolls, the pages are sewn together with thick linen thread, but in some they use little rawhide strips. Two of the Oberst Lieutenants of my regiment describe hanging out all the time in their letters---well those letters are written with the same ink (every batch of ink ages differently), and I am almost certain they used the same pen too. Because they were friends. You can taste it on the air at the end of the day, the ink and 400 years of dust and whatever horrible poo poo they colored the wax seals with, and it tastes bitter. Tru that. Thank you. I served some time in the BL, hunting through one of Coleridge's libraries (very much not my period) for any annotations in his hand. Boring work, I thought. One day, I was leafing through a book, and my boss glanced over, and plucked it out my hand. She said it had been bound by Dorothy Wordsworth (because of the material, which matched other books she'd bound). It suddenly reminded me that it's a privilege to be allowed to mess around with this stuff. I'm still never going to be able to learn to read 17th century handwriting though.
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Dec 6, 2015 00:45
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Mr Enderby posted:I served some time in the BL, hunting through one of Coleridge's libraries (very much not my period) for any annotations in his hand. How many libraries did the guy have?
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Dec 6, 2015 00:51
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The Lone Badger posted:How many libraries did the guy have? Well, it was more a case of, he liked to stay at other people's houses, and write in their books.
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Dec 6, 2015 00:56
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HEY GAL posted:I found a sheet of paper covered in tears once. Do you remember what the letter was about? Also, beautiful post.
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Dec 6, 2015 01:17
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Animal posted:Do you remember what the letter was about? It was a copy of an edict from the Emperor telling the Mansfeld Regiment that it could travel through various places and everyone had to support them, but only if they behaved themselves and didn't abuse "our poor subjects, the guiltless common man." The thing is, it was written before everything went to gently caress for the Mansfeld Regiment, back when Mansfeld thought he could just transfer them into Imperial service. But it was copied months later, when most of them had ditched their weapons and deserted and about six hundred of the ones who remained were scattered around Frankfurt am Main, alternately starving to death and committing atrocities in order to live. (Frankfurt wouldn't give them quarters, and it had walls and weapons to back that up.)
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Dec 6, 2015 01:26
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bewbies posted:That whole discussion owned, I remember actually doing some of the math and it was awesome with the end result being me having a whole lot more respect for the Berlin Airlift because that was some incredible poo poo right there. There's something amazing about forum threads where people come up with awful and weird ideas around knowledgeable people willing to do the math.
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Dec 6, 2015 01:32
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bewbies posted:That whole discussion owned, I remember actually doing some of the math and it was awesome with the end result being me having a whole lot more respect for the Berlin Airlift because that was some incredible poo poo right there. Do you have a link to the good part?
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Dec 6, 2015 01:32
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HEY GAL posted:Counterpoint: a manuscript is the only opportunity I will ever have to, as it were, reach out and touch my subjects' hands. Sometimes the sand is still in the documents and it gets everywhere, even into my hair--I'll scratch my head at the end of the day and come away with sand under my fingernails. Sometimes the musterschreiber used so much ink by accident that sand is still embedded in the words, and it glitters. The entire page will glitter. I found a sheet of paper covered in tears once. A colleague of mine found a wine-soaked playing card stuck between the pages of a French military trial document, but he told the archivist about it and the archivist pocketed it. In some muster rolls, the pages are sewn together with thick linen thread, but in some they use little rawhide strips. Two of the Oberst Lieutenants of my regiment describe hanging out all the time in their letters---well those letters are written with the same ink (every batch of ink ages differently), and I am almost certain they used the same pen too. Because they were friends. You can taste it on the air at the end of the day, the ink and 400 years of dust and whatever horrible poo poo they colored the wax seals with, and it tastes bitter. This is beautiful.
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Dec 6, 2015 01:34
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Squalid posted:yes Oh god not another History as a science derail The last time we did this we ended up declaring a Tank-Destroyer-level ban on the subject For the record, the levels are, in ascending order: Horses charging into spears, Tank Destroyers, Ethics of Hiroshima, Wojtek
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Dec 6, 2015 01:58
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Hazzard posted:"It's those drat Catholics! They hate our freedom! Either your with us or you're with the Papists!" I can imagine that being common Rhetoric in the Wars of Religion. Things don't change. I'm actually surprised that Hey Gal seems to run into very little of this. She even encounters cross religion officers, right? She's been making me wonder if religion was just an excuse for politics.
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Dec 6, 2015 02:20
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BurningStone posted:I'm actually surprised that Hey Gal seems to run into very little of this. She even encounters cross religion officers, right? She's been making me wonder if religion was just an excuse for politics.
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Dec 6, 2015 02:28
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If you got time to pray you got time to slay is what I always heard.
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Dec 6, 2015 02:31
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HEY GAL posted:civilians care a lot more By civilians, do you mean regular people or aristocrats? Does the Prince of West Nowhere care that he's got soldiers worshipping the wrong way? I guess they probably didn't. The army was viewed more as specialists hired for a job, rather than part of the nation, weren't they? And you've made me want to find an archive and start reading it.
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Dec 6, 2015 02:47
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ArchangeI posted:Oh god not another History as a science derail I mean, the others I can all see, but... Where's the controversy on Wojtek..? (Did I just break the thread?  )
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Dec 6, 2015 03:08
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wdarkk posted:Do you have a link to the good part? Here is this thread discussing the D&D Hiroshima thread (at least at one place, I think we went over it a couple of times), and here is the actual D&D thread in all of its glory.
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Dec 6, 2015 03:19
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spectralent posted:I mean, the others I can all see, but... Where's the controversy on Wojtek..? If we didn't ban it we'd get someone every other page going HEY GUYS HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS BEAR
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Dec 6, 2015 06:00
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Happens in imgur all the time... probably in other image share threads, too. Also, props for Hey Gal for making not early modern soldiery, not reenactment of early modern soldiery, but library research look cool - and I wanted to post this even before her beautiful post on manuscripts.
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Dec 6, 2015 11:41
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HEY GAL posted:notes that deserters left when they deserted. HEY GAL posted:sounds like something a heretic would say You say heretic, I say perfectly valid interpretation of a holy book.
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Dec 6, 2015 13:10
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Hazzard posted:What would they write in these notes? I'm just imagining it would be something Churchill-esque saying "I don't think you have the authority to keep me here so I'm leaving", but the soldiers don't strike me as having the wit or literacy to right something fancy. one deserter also said "PS, if I see your wife this winter I'll help her out with the firewood." Remember how tiny and incestuous the social world of the American army's officer corps was before the ACW, like in Killer Angels it turns out all the officers on both sides of the fight had known one another from beforehand, sometimes for years? Being a soldier who works for Saxony, at least before Breitenfeld, looks like it was like that. The same names keep showing up on roll after roll. And these people's writing isn't particularly polished, but they can be very eloquent. Less Churchill, more the rougher bits of Shakespeare. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Dec 6, 2015 |
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Dec 6, 2015 13:50
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Squalid posted:yes I with you, so long as one doesn't start believing history can be predicted accurately using scientific methods. We who are interested in it have seen so many insane and unpredictable coincidences shaping history for it to become codified in such a manner.
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Dec 6, 2015 14:15
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BurningStone posted:By civilians, do you mean regular people or aristocrats? Does the Prince of West Nowhere care that he's got soldiers worshipping the wrong way? The West-Nowhereians are their prince's feudal subjects, they might be a completely different ethnic group from him and speak a different language. If West Nowhere is in the Ottoman Empire, they might have a different religion entirely and the Satrap of West Nowhere doesn't give a poo poo because the 16th and 17th century Ottomans owned hard. (If West Nowhere is in the Holy Roman Empire, he cares. A lot.) The West-Nowhere soldiers are something between the prince's feudal subjects and his employees, and he might regret that they're a different religion from himself but he does not believe there's anything he can do about it. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Dec 6, 2015 |
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Dec 6, 2015 14:54
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HEY GAL posted:This is one of the legal books of the regiment I study (there are three), which have records of all the legal things that happened in that regiment. It's mostly trials, but it also has dying people making their wills, people owing each other money, and notes that deserters left when they deserted. The lines you're looking at say: Thanks! Neat history between a squashed spider. Another question, how can you tell the spider dates back to when the book was compiled and didn't get in there later? Not doubting you or anything, just wondering how one can tell. Falukorv fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Dec 6, 2015 |
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Dec 6, 2015 14:58
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Falukorv posted:Thanks! Neat history between a squashed spider.
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Dec 6, 2015 15:07
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HEY GAL posted:i can't, i was just assuming, because military dudes appear to do a bunch of their paperwork outdoors That's where the best light is, most of the time.
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Dec 6, 2015 16:16
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FAUXTON posted:That's where the best light is, most of the time.
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Dec 6, 2015 16:27
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HEY GAL posted:And lots of space. It's probably difficult to update your records if there are three of you in some farmhouse in addition to the people who actually live there, who hate and fear you. Also no windows.
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Dec 6, 2015 16:32
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There's really no sense in doing paperwork somewhere you can't keep a relaxed state of mind, and that means sills to get your defenestrative ballistics on, yo
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Dec 6, 2015 16:46
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HEY GAL posted:Nobody's "a state" yet, except maybe France, and in the first half of the 17th century France is terrible at a bunch of things.) You know, I might have a vote for the (lowland) Scots Covenanters, depending on if a church can also be a state. They were certainly about something other than personal relationships.
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Dec 6, 2015 17:22
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Typewritten pages can have just as much character as handwritten ones. I've seen old Tsarist era papers or captured German ones used for blanks, missing keys that had to be written in later by hand or replaced with keys from completely different typewriters (hey, k looks a lot like к), stuff like that. No spiders or suspicious stains yet, though.
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Dec 6, 2015 17:55
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ArchangeI posted:Oh god not another History as a science derail pshaw, the subject came up once like two years ago. I guess there isn't much to discuss anyway, if you aren't studying history scientifically you're basically just writing historical fiction. Tias posted:I with you, so long as one doesn't start believing history can be predicted accurately using scientific methods. We who are interested in it have seen so many insane and unpredictable coincidences shaping history for it to become codified in such a manner. Going to be contrarian here and disagree. For example you can predict the weather on any given date quite accurately just by referencing a weather almanac. Ah, but of course you meant HUMAN history, still though I disagree. I recently read this article describing how Alawites rose to power in Syria. Written in 1989, it boldly predicts that a continued Alawite monopoly on power is unsustainable, and that a sectarian conflict in Syria is inevitable. Not a very bold prediction admittedly, in 1982 there had already been a Sunni revolt. And I don't want to give the author too much credit, the prediction has no time-horizon and hence is not really falsifiable. Still it shows there was a fairly clear understanding that SOMETHING was going to happen in Syria. Perhaps the important issue is what it means to make predictions "accurately," and clearly it's not easy to accurately predict the future. In any case, whether we can predict future events is different from whether scientific methods should used to study the past, which obviously they should.
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Dec 6, 2015 18:56
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Ensign Expendable posted:Typewritten pages can have just as much character as handwritten ones. I've seen old Tsarist era papers or captured German ones used for blanks, missing keys that had to be written in later by hand or replaced with keys from completely different typewriters (hey, k looks a lot like к), stuff like that. No spiders or suspicious stains yet, though.
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Dec 6, 2015 19:01
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Squalid posted:Going to be contrarian here and disagree. For example you can predict the weather on any given date quite accurately just by referencing a weather almanac. Looking up what the weather was on a day in the past is not a prediction. If you think you can look at an almanac to predict accurately what the weather will be like on July 17, 2206, good luck. History is an observational science, akin to astronomy. It is not a direct experimental science. Unless, of course, you're Hari Seldon.
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Dec 6, 2015 19:08
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Deteriorata posted:History is an observational science, akin to astronomy. In fact, both of them are an effort to observe the past. 
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Dec 6, 2015 19:09
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Squalid posted:pshaw, the subject came up once like two years ago. I guess there isn't much to discuss anyway, if you aren't studying history scientifically you're basically just writing historical fiction. That's the issue, though, historians are writing fiction. We can not, by definition, get a full picture of what has happened in the past because we have to rely on records of flawed human beings. Even photographic evidence etc. is not complete because there is always something just out of frame, something that happened just before or after the picture was taken, which might be important to understanding the whole event. Obviously, the further back you go the more records get lost. So historians craft a narrative out of the available evidence, and emphasize some aspects over others. It's very well researched fiction, but it is fiction nonetheless. There will never be one single accepted account of events, which, in my opinion, would almost have to be the logical outcome of "scientific" study of history (in the same sense that evolution is now the one accepted theory explaining the origin of species). This is because there will always be a historian who can look at the available evidence and craft a slightly different narrative out of it.
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Dec 6, 2015 19:11
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ArchangeI posted:Oh god not another History as a science derail You forgot gay black Hitler.
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Dec 6, 2015 19:11
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On the idea of nationalism and states (or the lack of) in the 17th century, HEY GAL, are the Dutch any different in this account? Why did the Netherlands (or at lead half of it) rise up against their rulers, was it just religion or was their sense of Dutch solidarity?
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Dec 6, 2015 19:18
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my dad posted:In fact, both of them are an effort to observe the past. so is everything if you think about it *rips bong*
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Dec 6, 2015 19:19
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