This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.
Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:
Now: on with the show!
Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread
@Tollund_Man4:
Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022
@problem_redditor:
Sexulation
@problem_redditor:
Holocaustianity
Coloniazism
Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022
@Titus_1_16:
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"This is the sense in which, post-2010s, all marriages are gay marriages."
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"Oppression makes brutes of a people, and the oppressor ends up riding a tiger."
@YE_GUILTY:
Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022
@To_Mandalay:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
With a lot of historical subjects, historians often have to deal with the problem of "surviving accounts"; i.e., they get the perspectives of one group of people, but not the other. A classic example: almost all the written sources with respect to the period of Byzantine iconoclasm were written by the ultimately victorious iconophiles. Or take the Greco-Persian wars, of which we only have the perspective of the Greeks. This obviously creates problems with writing narrative histories: to what extent does the modern historian trust what sources survived when there is nothing to cross-reference their believability?
With the Holocaust this form of "survivor's history" is very literal: Eastern European Jews were killed in vastly larger numbers than Western Jews, and even among those who survived for the most part now lived under communist regimes with strict censorship. Media perceptions of the Holocaust are coloured by the disproportionate number of memoirs that came from western Jews; i.e. Jews that were much more likely to survive, live in a country with a free press, and write in a language other than Yiddish. The most famous Holocaust victim is Anne Frank, a German Jew, and likewise education about the lead-up to the Holocaust focuses largely on German Jews. Yet if you were order Holocaust victims by their nationality, German/Austrian Jews were only the sixth-most numerous victims (after Polish, Soviet, Hungarian, Romanian, and Czechoslovak Jews). You've almost certainly heard of Auschwitz, which had tens of thousands of survivors (mainly western Jews) due to housing a concentration camp and labour camp as well as its extermination facilities. But Belzec and Chelmno combined saw about as many deaths as Auschwitz but less than 70 survivors; how many Americans could name them? And roughly as many Jews died via mass executions as by gassing - not many of those machine-gunned by the Einsatzgruppen or beaten by a Slavic nationalist militia survived to tell their tale (though given any substantially large mass execution, there were always a few).
Memoirs themselves are often of dubious historical value. They are consciously meant to be read in a way by the public that a diary or correspondence is not, and that colours their usefulness. Holocaust deniers use them as a source of arguments because, naturally, they are a wellspring for exaggerations, misrememberings, and far-fetched anecdotes, and not infrequently outright invention. That's not to say they're worthless, but in terms of academic work historians prefer to use them as a supplement to other sources rather than rest an argument/narrative on them.
There is an incredible amount of first-hand testimony about the Holocaust, but what we have in abundance (namely accounts of western Jews, Germans, and German collaborators) is less revealing than the perspectives we're missing: the thoughts of those who died, and those of the higher-ranking Nazis who facilitated their deaths.
Btw, why don't we have any records from the Persians? I thought they were a pretty sophisticated empire.
Just too many armies sweeping through burning all the libraries for the next two thousand years?
You‘d have to narrow your question down. AFAIK archaeology has found mundane bureaucratic records from the Achaemenids.
Are you asking for historiography in particular?
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We have some records from the Persians, but they tend to be more archaeological rather than narrative histories (or plays, or essays, or other written works).
The long story short is that papyrus scrolls require careful handling, and even with that reproduction; i.e. the surviving Classical works from the Romans and Greeks were not the originals but copies of copies. Hellenistic scribes evidently were less interested in reproducing Persian texts than they were Greek ones. Presumably the Arab conquest and subsequent wars didn't help either, but even by the time of the Romans, written Persian sources were noticeably lacking.
Herodotus was evidently working with Persian sources when writing his histories, be they written or oral histories, as well as presumably interviewing Persians themselves. By contrast Plutarch's Parallel Lives (which is our first reasonably full accounting of the life of Alexander, despite being written about 400 years after Alexander), while drawing heavily from now-lost Greek sources that were written during or shortly after the time of Alexander, is near-completely silent about the Persian perspective.
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Yes we do.
Persepolis Fortification Tablets
https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/persepolis-fortification-archive
More like: too much new construction and excavation in the last 50 years, with all archaeological remains of the past bulldozed away and built over.
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