[Modern History] Guns Condoms and Electricity

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Modern History] Guns Condoms and Electricity

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

whoops didn't read down

# ¿ Apr 3, 2021 01:02

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 23:08

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Raskolnikov38 posted:

the slap fighting between hastings and the sleepwalkers guy is hilarious to read

Never saw this, but I really did enjoy Sleepwalkers. The guy did an absolute bucketload of research across a whole bunch of different languages which is pretty drat impressive.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Literally every white Brit over 60 believes they personally fought in WW2 under the benevolent leadership of Churchill, Greatest Briton of All Time.

To be fair every nation has their myths like this. For a long time every French person of a certain age would claim they were part of the Resistance.

Dreylad has issued a correction as of 01:07 on Apr 3, 2021

# ¿ Apr 3, 2021 01:05

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

That Victoria 2 post is extremely my poo poo, thanks for sharing it. The way Paradox games have represented history, especially over different versions of the game is really interesting and you can see how the changing influences of what the devs are probably reading. EU4 going from the old Westernization decision to Institutions was a notable one.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2021 15:47

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

A Buttery Pastry posted:

The thing they're reading is the Paradox thread in games. By heroically calling them Euro/Swedocentric until the non-goon sourced devs largely stopped posting, we have forced them to address the ideological blind spots of their games. Goon entryism has also resulted in Marxist control over the Victoria franchise, the team lead being our very own Wiz, wresting it out of the hands of a Thatcherite. Games is the true vanguard of the revolution.

until the Stellaris thread started accusing Wiz of racism over immigration mechanics lol

also the Battle of Blair Mountain is nuts. imagine gathering together all your unions and allies to face off against company strikebreakers and associated corrupt sheriffs and the loving air force shows up and bombs you

# ¿ Sep 5, 2021 23:17

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Weka posted:

To be pedantic, it was the United States Army Air Service at the time.

sir or madam this is the modern history thread

being pedantic is essential. i stand corrected.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2021 21:20

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

"1491" & "1493" by Charles C. Mann.
"Mohawk Saint" by Allan Greer
"Late Victorian Holocaust" by Mike Davis
"The Great Leveler" by Walter Scheidel
"American Slavery, American Freedom" by Edmund Morgan

# ¿ Sep 25, 2021 22:33

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

I also like a lot of stuff by C.V. Wedgewood, although more for the fact that I think she's a good writer and can really tell a compelling story, and less for contributions to contemporary historiography as she was writing about 70-80 years ago.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2021 01:09

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

oh no i was duped

# ¿ Sep 26, 2021 04:29

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

HootTheOwl posted:

Ok but the poop shortage one better be real.
The guano islands being scraped bare.

That has to be one of the worst jobs on this planet. Read a description of it in 1493 and dear god

# ¿ Sep 28, 2021 22:20

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

the LBJ series by Robert Caro is great if you want to read extremely in depth biography of an American politician who touched on every transformation in American politics and the Democratic party over the 20th century.

T. Harry Williams biography of Huey Long is also excellent.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2021 15:31

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Raskolnikov38 posted:

in fact iirc it was a flavius decision

i thought it was twoday and was going to respect it out of that but now im not so sure.

both seem active enough though and it's good to have more specific threads imo

# ¿ Oct 1, 2021 01:40

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Raskolnikov38 posted:

also grad school history is like trying to drink from a firehose, gently caress

yeah intro, maybe a chapter or two if you're feeling frisky and conclusion. it's how i got through comps

# ¿ Oct 2, 2021 03:15

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

There's a bunch of stuff related to WW1, Christopher Clark talks about it in his book "Sleepwalkers" but yeah the clean Wermacht would be a pretty good example to look at with plenty of articles and books to work with.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2021 22:18

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

i say swears online posted:

well this is outright false, lol

otherwise, i do agree that western intervention was somewhat halfhearted compared to war investment just a year or two prior. the numbers of troops committed are barely comparable

edit lmao

Part of the halfhearted effort was the fact that domestic labour tensions were at an all-time high and trying to get soldiers who had just fought in WW1 to go invade Russia in the winter went about as well as you expected.

I'm only really familiar with the Canadian context, but like half the troops never made it out of Vladivostok because they all got STDs.

Not sure where Duncan is getting this interpretation from, but to me it showed how freaked out the west was of the Russian revolution that after fighting one of the most destructive wars in history, they still made an effort to try to put it down despite the financial precarity of the European Great Powers and the amount of discontent there was at home throughout the west.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2022 08:00

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

V. Illych L. posted:

in the US and UK the soviet revolution didn't find many adherents, but it had huge consequences in terms of crackdown and even in britain they did an actual general strike before chickening out. revolution was very much in the air in the years following the bolshevik seizure of power

I don't have a lot of evidence to be able to prove this for certain, but just knowing a bit about labour activism in Canada and in other parts of the Commonwealth, I wonder if the UK never radicalized to that degree partly because there was constant emigration of young working class people to the former colonies. Certainly a lot of Canadian labour leaders involved (and arrested for) the Winnipeg General Strike, for example, were all British immigrants.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2022 19:25

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

vyelkin posted:

cspam should be a niall ferguson free zone

seconded.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2022 04:34

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Yeah historiography is often a pendulum. I thought Sleepwalkers was fine but I'm not deeply familiar with the arguments at play. I thought some of his arguments about Austro-Hungary were interesting anyway.

my dad posted:

I've had goons quote Sleepwalkers at me in a "Serbs had the genocide coming" way. Which generally shapes how I think of that book. Haven't read it.

The book opens with a description of the overthrow of one of the Serbian kings which is a particularly bloody and brutal affair, maybe that's part of it? I don't feel like he blames the Serbs, but he also doesn't them treat them like they were completely hapless and without any kind of agency.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2022 14:50

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

StashAugustine posted:

question coming from preparing to paint up miniatures for a ww1 strategy game: which powers used colonial forces in Europe? I think the French used African troops, the British used Indian troops but mostly used Africans in the colonies (?), German had African colonies but idk if they got troops from them to Europe

Canadians and Australians were both brought over to support the BEF.

But seriously I don't recall ever hearing about German colonial troops in Europe, it was mainly the British and French

# ¿ Apr 13, 2022 05:16

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Endman posted:

Germany, cursed to always and forever be a second rate power because they can't boat good

otoh their navy helped trigger a socialist revolution after ww1 so it's impossible to say if it's good or bad

# ¿ Apr 14, 2022 07:47

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Weka posted:

Will this fit as a thread title?

Yes

# ¿ Apr 25, 2022 08:00

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

I can't believe I forgot to post this here

https://www.bayoubrief.com/2021/09/26/holes-in-the-story-huey-p-long-carl-weiss-and-the-american-spectacle-of-conspiracy/

# ¿ May 8, 2022 02:58

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Antonymous posted:

it would eliminate a "how this feels to me in the present time and place" as the fundamental basis for understanding the world

I'm cool with eliminating poli sci too.

# ¿ May 25, 2022 14:37

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

I asked vyelkin about books on that subject a while ago and this is what he gave me:

quote:

1) Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, a thick academic book about the nature of Stalinism and Soviet life. Really good and surprisingly accessible for an academic history, and very influential on the field's understanding of life in the USSR.

2) Karl Schl�gel, Moscow 1937. A bit of an odd book that tries to just kind of give a panorama of what Moscow was like in the single pivotal year of 1937, but does a pretty good job of it. Also pretty easy to read since a lot of the chapters are shorter and focus on specific people or events.

3) James Harris, The Great Fear. A recent (and mercifully short) book that wants to update our understanding of Soviet motivations for the Great Purge/Terror, and that I think does a good job of it.

4) Comedy option, Yuri Slezkine's The House of Government. A doorstop that a lot of people treated as a masterpiece when it came out but that is, as one esteemed scholar put it, "too long to be good".

# ¿ Jul 7, 2022 21:12

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

anything involving the italians in any war

# ¿ Jul 26, 2022 02:24

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Bomber crews in 1943 had an average lifespan of 11 missions.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2022 16:28

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/JimBarrett/status/1570481993908981765

the more u know

It's an old book now but Wedgewood's A Coffin For King Charles is a great read.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2022 21:33

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I'm trying to think of all the military advances the French gave us and so far I have

1. Canned food
2. Superfiring battleship turrets
3. The turreted tank
4. The machine gun
5. Giving a poo poo about your country

�lan-as-military-power-levels

# ¿ Sep 29, 2022 01:36

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Azathoth posted:

in an era when the thames was an open sewer and animal poo poo was everywhere, everyone still remarked on the smell. i genuinely cannot imagine what the smell would be like and i live near industrial hog farms

Oh yeah? How about the smell coming from the Chincha Islands, where migratory sea birds stopped and took a dump for several millennia. The Andean natives figured out that guano could replenish soil fertility, and had llamas haul it from the islands up into the terraced agriculture lands of the Andes, and there were even "penalties for disturbing the birds during nesting or taking guano allocated to other villages."

But then Europeans figured out the value of guano, and you can probably guess what happened next:

(from 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann)

quote:

It was said that the islands gave off a stench so intense that they were difficult to approach. They were a clutch of dry, granitic mounds thirteen miles off the Peruvian shore, about five hundred miles south of Lima on the west coast of South America. [...] Predators and prey both are preyed upon by the Peruvian booby, cormorant, and pelican. All three have nested on the Chincha islands for millennia. Over time they have covered the islands with a layer of guano as much as 150 feet thick.

[...]

Supplying European farmers with guano would involve transporting large quantities of excrement across the Atlantic, a project that understandably failed to enthuse shipping companies. Within several decades, though the picture changed. Agricultural reformers throughout Europe had to begun to worry that the ever-more intense agriculture necessary to feed growing populations was exhausting the soil. As harvests leveled off and even decreased, they looked for something to restore the land: fertilizer.

At the time, the best known soil additive was bone meal, made by pulverizing bones from slaughterhouses. Bushels of bones went to grinding factories in Britain, France, and Germany. Demand ratcheted up, driven by fears of soil depletion. Bone dealers supplied the factories from increasingly untoward sources, including the recent battlefields of Waterloo and Austerlitz. "It is now ascertained beyond a doubt, by actual experiment upon an extensive scale, that a dead solider is a most valuable article of commerce,' remarked the London Observer in 1822. The newspaper noted that there was no reason to believe that graver robbers were limiting themselves to battlefields. "For aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread."

From this perspective, avian feces began to seem like a reasonable item of commerce. A few bags of guano appeared in European ports in the mid-1830s. Then Justus von Liebig weighed in. A pioneering organic chemist, Liebig was the first to explain plants' dependence on nutrients,, especially nitrogen. In his treatise Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and physiology (1840), Liebig criticized the use of bone fertilizer, which has little nitrogen. Guano was another story [...]

Guano mania took hold. [...] In forty years, Peru exported about 13 million tons of guano, [receiving] for it approximately $13 billion in today's dollars. It was the beginning of today's input-intensive agriculture - the practice of transferring huge amounts of crop nutrients from one place to another, distant place according to plans dictated by scientific research.

Hoping to take maximum advantage of the guano rush, Peru nationalized the Chinchas. Soon it discovered that nobody wanted to work on the islands. Except for birds, their only inhabitants were bats, scorpions, spiders, ticks, and biting flies. Not a single plant grew on their barren slopes. Worse, the islands had no water, every drop had to be shipped in. Because the land was blanketed in guano, miners worked, ate, and slept on shelves of ancient excrement. So little rain fell that the soluble materials in the guano never washed away - it remained studded with crystals of ammonia nitrate, which broke in corrosive clouds around miners' shovels. Powdery an acrid, the guano went into miners' carts, which were pushed up rails to a depot atop one of the seaside cliffs. From the cliff,. men dumped tons of excrement through a long canvas tube directly into the bellies of the vessels below. Slamming into the hold, guano dust exploded from the hatchways, shoruding the ship in a toxic fog. Workers wore masks made from hemp, smeared with tar, one visitor noted:

quote:
but the guano mocks at such weak defenses...[T]hey are unable to remain below longer than twenty minutes at one time. They are then relieved by another party, and return on deck perfectly naked, streaming with perspiration, and with their brown skins thickly coated with guano.

The government could have paid high wages to get workers to endure these terrible conditions, but that would have cut into profits. Instead it stocked the islands with a mix of convicts, army deserters, and African slaves. This arrangement proved unsatisfactory: the convicts and deserters killed each other, and the slaves were so valuable that their mainland owners did not wish to part with them.

In 1849 Peru gave up trying to run the mines itself and awarded an exclusive concession to Domingo Elias, Peru's biggest cotton grower and one of its principal slave owners. [...] In return for the monopoly, Elias was supposed to mine guano with his own slaves, but he, too, was reluctant to take them away from his cotton fields. He induced the government to subsidize merchants who imported immigrants. Prominent among these subsidized importers was Domingo Elias. By the time the law passed his agents were already in Fujian, waving labor contracts in the faces of illiterate villagers.

In standard indenture practice, the contracts promised the Chinese would pay for their passage by working, typically for eight years, in the newly discovered California gold fields. (The actual destination was not mentioned.) The ruse was plausible: agents for US firms were in Fujian at the same time, telling a similar lie as they sought indentured servants to build railroads. People who signed the bogus Peruvian contract were conducted to bleak human warehouses in Amoy (now called Xiamen, on an island across from the river from Yue-gang), and later, Macao. People who refused to sign were often kidnapped and shipped to the same warehouses. In these dark confines slavers burned the letter C - for California, their ostensible destination - into the backs of their ears. No longer were the men described as workers. Their new name was zhuzai, 'little pigs.' "None were let outside," wrote the Shanghai historian Wu, Ruozeng. "Those who resisted were whipped; any who tried to escape were killed."

[...] Peru represented the worst passage, the direst conditions, the most dreaded destination. Ultimately at least 100 000 Chinese were taken there. Conditions en route can be compared to those in the transatlantic slave trade. Perhaps one out of eight zhuzai died. As on the Atlantic slave ships, revolts were common. Eleven mutinies are known to have occurred on Peru-bound vessels; at least five bloodily succeeded.

[...]At any given time between one and two thousand were on the Chincha Islands. In classic divide-and-conquer fashion, Elias forestalled rebellion by setting his African slaves as overseers over his Chinese slaves and holding both to strict deadlines. Spasms of cruelty, slave upon slave, were the inevitable result. Guano miners swung their picks up to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, to fulfill their assigned daily quotas (as much as five tons of guano); two-thirds of their pay was deducted for room (reed huts) and board (a cup of maize with some bananas). Failure to meet the daily quota was rewarded with a five-foot rawhide whip. Minor infractions were punished by torture. Escape from the islands was impossible. Suicide was frequent. One overseer told a New York Times correspondent that:

quote:
more than sixty had killed themselves during the year,...chiefly by throwing themselves from the cliffs. They are buried, as they lived, like so many dogs. I saw one who had been drowned - it was not known whether accidentally or not - lying on the guano, when I first went ashore. All the morning, his dead body lay in the sun; in the afternoon, they had covered it in a few inches, and there it lies, along with many similar heaps, within a few yards of where they were digging.

So many Chinese died that overseers marked off an acre of guano as a cemetery.

Journalistic expos�s of guano slavery created an international scandal that gave the Lima government an excuse to eject Elias and renegotiate the guano contract with someone else, thus procuring a second round of bribes. Fulminating against the evils of official corruption, Elias sought to regain his lucrative concession by twice staging a coup d'�tat. Both attempts failed. IN 1857 he tried the legal route, running for president without success.

And then Europe went to war over the islands.

Dreylad has issued a correction as of 16:40 on Oct 5, 2022

# ¿ Oct 5, 2022 16:35

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

mawarannahr posted:

hey folks, I�m interested in reading about gas attacks in warfare, especially chlorine and related substances like phosgene. any good books? Frosted Flake

No Place To Run by Tim Cook covers the Canadian Expeditionary Force experience with gas warfare in WW1, which isn't as niche as it sounds as the Canadians had to become experts in chemicals warfare both on the offense and defense.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2022 01:27

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 23:08

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Suplex Liberace posted:

was this thread talking about odd westad? whats the general consensus about their books?

i generally liked his stuff 10-15 years ago, he usually focused on the non-aligned movement which was often pretty interesting.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2022 20:33

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