Yes, it’s the week of Talk Like a Pirate Day, and in honor of one of our favorite (and most meaningless) celebrations, we’ve got some piratical activity planned fer the good ship Skwib.
On Monday Professor Billy Bones will be handing out the syllabus for the freshmen class at Pirate University; on Tuesday, we have yer boco-neer fiction planned; and on Wednesday, a very special edition of Ask General Kang. Thursday is the Carnival of Piratical Satire, and on Friday, we’ll, let’s just say that yer average skwab don’t think that far ahead.
And for now, here are a few more carnies whose poop decks we’ve darkened, and some pirate-related posts to slake yer bloody appetites:
A fine Sunday Carnival of the Godless: not that all pirates are atheists, but there is grand swath of godless in the crew.
The Friday Ark, where we thought about poor old Capt’n Hook when we saw the link to a Jurassic Neverneverland .
The History Carnival, where you can see a scary skull and crossbones and read about yer worst curse of the pirate — the plague (okay, the worst after running out of grog).
Carnival of the Mundane, where you will find a posting that is about as anti-pirate as you can imagine. If a pirate has sore feet, we just cut them off and replace them furniture. Arrrrrrr!!
This is my favoritest link to my blog ever. Thanks! 🙂 Liz
[…] Is Patahistory Fun?The Manifesto chides historians for endlessly writing about “war, disease, starvation, and oppression,” and then wondering why people think history isn’t fun. “Only perverse and idiosyncratic minds … want to learn more about this miserable past.” Must be a lot of perverse and idiosyncratic minds out there, because miserable pasts of war and oppression seem pretty popular from where I’m sitting. Airminded compared the Battle of Britain to the movie, Battle of Britain. Normblog serialized a talk on the ubiquity of gallows’ hills in Shetland while Salto Sobrius dug up gallows’ hills in Sweden. The Year ‘Round ponders the ins and outs of hanging and a series of historic Victorian homicides. Holocaust Controversies continues doing battle with a YouTube-based holocaust denier, a battle with no end in sight; they call it “fun,” but I have my doubts. That damn yankee Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory discussed a new Civil War documentary, Virginians Desolate, Virginians Free, and also the work of Chandra Manning. Both discussions relate to the recent fracas over military history (Mark Grimsley is in the trenches of that fight; Spinning Clio surveys the battle from higher ground) and turn on the centrality of slavery to the Civil War experience. A comment on Kevin’s latter post accuses Manning of reductionism, in her insistence that ideas about slavery were fundamental to the worldview of soldiers on both sides. To which I reply: Chandra is a good and brilliant friend of mine, the one in grad school who put all the rest of us to shame. I’ve seen the size of her dissertation, to be published by Knopf next year, and I assure you it is not reductive about anything.“Isn’t play also part of the human condition?” asks the Manifesto. “Where are the jokes? The songs? The dancing?” Well, Ali Eteraz asks if the prophet Muhammad was funny, but concludes he was more “lighthearted” and “corny” than ha ha funny. Sort of like my Dad. “Patahistory is a ludic history,” sayeth the Manifesto: that is, a playful history, a history of games. At Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog (of Serpentes on a Shippe fame), Chaucer’s son Lowys heaps derision on a computer game based on the Hundred Year’s War. Lowys’ 14th-century leet-speak is priceless: “IS ST SWITHUNZ DAY AND FOR XL MORE DAYS IT WILL BE RAINING THE BLOOD OF NOOBS!” But games can be serious business: Brett Schulte at American Civil War Gaming & Reading presents parts eight and nine of a mind-boggling ten part series on Eric Jacobson’s For Cause and for Country, a book about the Civil War battle of Franklin, Tennessee. Brett’s thoroughness testifies to the intense interest of certain gamers and simulators in accurate history. Acephalous‘ Scott Kaufman has a much shorter answer for why the South lost the Civil War.Weak Segues and Synchronic HistoryThe patahistorian embraces weak segues; the Manifesto doesn’t say that anywhere, but I’m going to have to pretend it does or I’ll never get through all these links. At History Unfolding, David Kaiser looked at where the money went in 1965 and today. Adjusted for inflation, Kaiser found, almost every basic necessity costs only half today what it did in 1965–but in that “almost” lies at least one big catch. Jonathan Dresner learned from the Guardian’s News Blog that the British chocolate industry was founded by Quakers. “I wonder if the Pennsylvania Dutch have anything to do with Hershey’s,” he asks. Don’t get me started on candy history, Jonathan. Milton Hershey was in fact a Mennonite, not to mention an idealistic philanthropist who tried to build a chocolate utopian community and gave his fortune to orphans; his great rival, Forrest Mars Sr., was a notorious miser and recluse who lived out his days in a Las Vegas candy factory like the offspring of Willy Wonka and Howard Hughes. At American Presidents Blog, James Buchanan: A Lesson In Name Calling, remarks on the sexuality of the bachelor president and links to a weird but cool little exhibit called Tall, Slim, and Erect, which combines obscure biographical data on the U.S. presidents with portraits of plastic figurines for an odd meditation on the office and the men. My favorite figurine is probably Woodrow Wilson’s, my favorite entry Benjamin Harrison’s. APB also provides evidence that Barbara Bush was once a hottie.It had no explicitly historical posts in the past fortnight, but I’m happy for the return of Petri Dish, which blogs on science, culture and history. This post on a class in science and popular culture is interesting, and it sounds like a great class. I’m also happy to welcome the second year of the Science Creative Quarterly, which seems like the sort of place Alfred Jarry would feel right at home. Editor Dave Ng combined Bruce Lee, SUVs, and DNA site-directed mutagenesis in his own manifesto of sorts, while Angela Beckett explained how to win a Nobel Prize. Collection Resurrection is a new blog by a recent graduate of my university’s public history program, now curating and restoring the collections of a small town Ontario museum. Seeds of Growth called Eli Whitney the original “Long Tail” entrepreneur. Chris Clarke’s comic book adaptation of Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts may or may not be up when you read this–its sheer awesomeness devoured his bandwidth and crashed his site.Patahistory requires “synchronic history,” the history of current things. A blog called Lewis and Clark: What Else Happened, dedicated to chronicling what else happened on every day of the Lewis and Clark expedition, reached its journey’s end this month, two hundred years to the day after Lewis and Clark completed theirs. Walking the Berkshires presented Patriotic Cover, with great images of Civil War era postcards, and discussed Lincoln’s Fast Day of September 26, 1861. Other holidays and anniversaries were noted in the blogosphere: Radical Geek observed Ignore the Constitution Day on September 17th. I suspect the Bush Administration observed it too, but perhaps not the way Rad Geek had in mind. The Axis of Evel Knievel marked the 68th birthday of “the worst historical analogy ever” and the start of last century’s longest conventional war. Finally, I know you know that September 19th was Talk Like A Pirate Day. The Skwib waxed piratical all week; I’m Too Sexy For My Master’s Thesis pointed to this article on Jewish Pirates (”The first shmuck to kvetch will find his tuchus keel-hauled!” declared my friend Judd Karlman); and Patahistory’s Dave Davisson, who is ultimately to blame for all of this, gets the final word with a wordless post: Pirates vs. Ninjas.The End of PatahistoryTa-da! That concludes this edition of the History Carnival. Thanks for scrolling. Jeremy Boggs will host the next History Carnival at ClioWeb on October 15th. (Look! He has cute baby pictures on his blog too!) Contact him via his site or use this handy form to submit entries for the next carnival. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the History Carnival homepage or at the Blog Carnival Index. I am out of here. […]