Welcome to this week’s History Thread! This week, our discussion question: Favorite works of historical fiction. Favorite can mean a number of things, eg. just personal enjoyment, degree of accuracy, something that shapes your view of specific events or people, … Continue reading The Fictional History Thread

Welcome to the first History Thread of 2019! As usual we’ll do an open thread, though I’ll try and think of discussion questions for future ones. Please enjoy and post historical things. Today’s the sixtieth anniversary of Fidel Castro taking … Continue reading A New Year, a New History Thread

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! I’m going to take a break next week for Christmas (though I won’t object if someone else wants to throw something up). This week’s discussion question: History you’ve learned in 2018. It can be … Continue reading The Holiday History Thread!

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! As usual there won’t be a set discussion topic this week, though I might try and come up with new ones for future threads. Today’s picture: On December 11, 1917 British forces commanded by … Continue reading The Triumphant Weekly History Thread

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! The broader theme of this discussion is self-conscious archaism, the act of deliberately looking back to the past as a source of inspiration and emulating it in some way. This umbrella term also covers … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread Appropriates the Past for Its Own Ends

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone (both pictured above). Cleve Jones, Milk’s friend and ally, has a nice remembrance for … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread Remembers

Thanksgiving is a strange holiday. It nominally commemorates a celebratory harvest dinner hosted by the Massachusetts Puritans in the fall of 1621, to which local Native Americans were invited in a spirit of friendship and gratitude for their help surviving … Continue reading John Redcorn’s Thankstaking History Thread

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Our picture commemorates the 36th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opening in Washington, DC. Designed by 21 year old architecture student Maya Lin, its simple design (a black wall listing the names of … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today is the 80th anniversary of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which allegedly caused panic across the country from hayseeds who thought it signaled a real alien invasion (though modern historians … Continue reading The Panicked Weekly History Thread

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Have fun and discuss what you will! Today’s picture: on October 23, 1739 Britain declared war on Spain. One of the 18th Century’s innumerable inscrutable imperial conflicts, the war stemmed in part from Robert … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread is All Ears

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today’s picture: On this day in 1869, several men digging a well in Cardiff, New York discovered an unusual specimen: a ten foot tall man made of stone! Immediately dubbed the Cardiff Giant, it … Continue reading The Giant Weekly History Thread

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! I will forgo a discussion topic again this week so we can have…fun? Today’s picture: 51 years ago, Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American Justice on the Supreme Court. Marshall had a distinguished career … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread is Sworn In

Welcome to this week’s history thread! Today’s topic: Democracy. Perhaps as much of a philosophical/political discussion as historical, but there are plenty of historical examples upon which to draw. Does democracy work? Is it the most desirable form of government, … Continue reading The Democratic Weekly History Thread

History Thread. Today’s picture: 120 years ago today marked the beginning of the Fashoda Crisis in modern-day Sudan. The Sudan gained independence from Britain and Egypt during the Mahdist uprising of the previous decade, leading a number of European nations … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread is Ready to Fight

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! This week will discuss unlikely alliances, be they political, military, dynastic, artistic, etc. Events make strange bedfellows, sometimes literally, so let’s celebrate them. Today’s picture: September 4 commemorates two more seminal dates in American … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread Makes the Deadliest Friend

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! This week will be another open thread, so feel free to discuss what you will. Today’s picture: Emmett Till was lynched on August 28, 1955. The fourteen year old Till, a Chicago native, was … Continue reading The Outraged Weekly History Thread

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! The discussion theme is: damnatio memoriae and other historical erasure.  In ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae involved a postmortem condemnation of Roman emperors or elites that could include seizure of property, the eradication of the … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread Has Been Erased

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! This week we’ll try having a discussion question for the first time in awhile (though don’t feel bound by it): pieces of historical writing that changed your worldview. Be it a book, an essay, … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread Writes, Strikes and Otherwise Causes Change

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! I’ll try coming up with discussion topics for future threads, but let’s again have fun talking about whatever. This week’s picture: On August 7, 1964 both houses of Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! No rules except have fun and don’t gratuitously insult your fellow posters! Today’s image: on this date in 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decided to celebrate the Reconquest of Spain from Islam by … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread

Welcome to this week’s History Thread! No discussion topic, just fun and learning! Today’s picture: On July 24, 1915 the SS Eastland, a passenger ship used for touring Lake Michigan, capsized while docked in Chicago. Exactly what happened is unclear, … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread Capsizes!