Pet peeve of mine, but there are many 'history facts' twitter feeds (good) and they often include images with the facts (also good) but sometimes don't the dates of the images.

Always differentiate 1 Period artwork, 2 scholarly reconstruction or 3 random early-modern painting.
Lay readers often cannot tell the different between period artwork/scholarly reconstruction and Renaissance of early modern (or modern) interpolation.

They tend to assume, quite reasonably, if you are showing a picture, it's because 'that's what it looked like.'
Now there's value too in showing, say, a Renaissance painting of a classical scene with some history facts about the event as a way to say 'look, this remained relevant an interesting, here's another take on it.'

But you've gotta date that painting!
(This is, to be clear, not in response to anything in particular and no one should take this as a subtweet. It is merely something that grinds my gears generally. It also drives me nuts in lectures, presentations and essays either online or in print)

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Bret Devereaux

Bret Devereaux Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @BretDevereaux

3 Mar
This is a really interesting question. I can't put a full answer to the question on twitter (but it has been on the blog's to-do list for a while), but I can discuss it in a little depth and give at least some idea for folks unfamiliar and seeing it show up w/ students. 1/xx
So the quickly: Europa Universalis IV is a grand strategy game where the player plays as a state (note: not a ruler, but the state itself. Rulers come and go) between c. 1450 and c. 1800.

It is, as the name suggests, the fourth such game from Swedish developer Paradox. 2/xx
As compared to other popular historical war games like Total War or Civilization, Paradox's games (including EU4) tend to trade a lot more heavily on historical accuracy and so present at least the *idea* of being a historical simulation as much as a game. 3/xx
Read 46 tweets
10 Feb
It is really tricky to explain and even trickier to prove to readers who have perhaps not so much experience with different languages that just because a word X in foreign language is translated to word Y in English does not mean they represent precisely the same concept. 1/8
This apropos of arguing that English 'courage' isn't quite the same as Latin's fortis or virtus, or Greek's ἀνδρεία (or any other number of similarly translatable words), despite the fact that in a translation you will, of course, read 'courage' for those words. 2/8
So you end up arguing in circles because the retort comes back, "but these are all forms of courage."

But they're not! The Greeks didn't have modern English 'courage' in mind forming ἀνδρεία and senses of courage are non-overlapping. 3/8
Read 8 tweets
9 Feb
Oof.

So, 1) there was no 'Greek republic' because 2) there was no united ancient Greek state and 3) Greek self government ended because of outside (Macedonian) conquest.

Also, 4) the Romans had a Senate too, famously...that doesn't seem to have helped...
...because 5) the reason the Roman Republic collapsed (in part, welcome to 'it's complicated') was that the Senate proved sometimes unable and frequently unwilling to rein in power magistrates or to hold them accountable for their dangerous and illegal actions.
Are there warnings from ancient history about excessive polarization? Absolutely.

But there are also lots of warnings about the dangers posed by ambitious men seeking power and by cowardly politicians too scared to restrain them.
Read 5 tweets
8 Feb
This is a good thread that I think nails the lottery nature of academia as a result of marketization, but as always I think it is then necessary to ask 'marketization in contrast to what?'

'System is bad' is true but alternatives must be considered to be useful. 1/25
So briefly, while organized university-like training existed first in East Asia and the Islamic world, the modern university's organization comes through the European tradition, where the universities were founded - often by kings - mostly to train priests. 2/25
(I am gliding over some complexity here, of course).

Moving into the early modern period, emergent European states (and later, their colonies) expand that model substantially. The model gets exported and adopted, even outside of the cultural context of its origin. 3/25
Read 25 tweets
8 Feb
Sometimes going back to writing or editing a formal piece of writing after working on the blog, I am really struck by how much of a useful crutch it can be to be able to drop into an informal, conversational register.
It just makes managing flow and sentence length so much easier if you can follow up a technical sentence by dropping into that conversational register where you can sum up the big complex idea with a few quick words and a joke.
By way of example, this long chunk would have been hard to write in an entirely formal register especially if I wanted it to be reasonably digestible.

So I have some big complex sentences (especially in the first paragraph), which are then summed up conversationally at the end. Image
Read 4 tweets
24 Jan
An interesting article over at @AncientWorldMag on the idea of 'states' in the ancient world: ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/state…

I think it both presents an interesting argument and a solid summation of scholarly perspectives on the question, but I don't quite buy the argument. 1/21
Hall's main point: that 'state'-ness is necessarily a fuzzy set is valid and well made. Was Rome a 'state' in 477 when the Fabii fell against Veii? Probably not.

The state is defined as an entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force... 2/21
...for the Fabii to fight this way suggests that the Roman Republic itself didn't yet have that monopoly.

And of course even in the modern period we have developed terms to express some of the fuzziness of the 'state' set. We thus talk about 'failed states' for... 3/21
Read 21 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!