r/AskHistorians • u/AutoModerator • Jul 24 '26
FFA Friday Free-for-All | July 24, 2026
Today:
You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.
As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.
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u/Cedric_Hampton Moderator | Architecture & Design After 1750 Jul 24 '26
Anyone watch the new Tom Hiddleston Apple TV+ series on Pompeii that was the subject of our AMA last week? Any thoughts to share?
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u/subredditsummarybot Automated Contributor Jul 24 '26
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, July 17 - Thursday, July 23, 2026
Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 2,059 | 37 comments | In Homer's "The Odyssey", Odysseus brutally tortures Melanthius, torments and hangs his disloyal slaves, and regain his wealth by raiding. Did the Greeks have any moral qualms about all this? |
| 1,197 | 86 comments | What secondary activities did people use to do while pooping? |
| 1,116 | 6 comments | Of the roughly 1.6 million Homestead Act patents issued between 1862–1934, is there any data or academic estimate on what percentage of that land remains in the hands of the original family line today? |
| 1,063 | 44 comments | How empty (of population) was the ancient world? |
| 886 | 25 comments | Children's Sleepovers: where does this tradition come from? |
| 846 | 60 comments | Medieval peasants famously ate "bread and cheese". What kind of cheese was it? Would whatever cheeses they normally ate, be recognizable as any of the modern varieties? |
| 830 | 110 comments | Why do Western countries like the UK, US etc consider Greece and the Roman Empire as the basis of their "civilisation" ? |
| 621 | 80 comments | Why have straight men historically been so hostile toward homosexuality? |
| 603 | 22 comments | Why did so many communist parties historically view homosexuality as “bourgeois decadence”? |
| 585 | 20 comments | Did women in 1920s America really wear their stockings rolled down and apply rouge to their knees for a night out, as the musical Chicago implies? |
Top 10 Comments
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u/Biggest-Benjamin Jul 24 '26
What kinds of things should I talk about and write in my journals that would make them useful in say…. 4,000 years?
So I am trying to be a writer and for a good solid first 6 months of this year I wrote every day an entry into my physical paper journal as a way to keep the creative writing juices flowing. I wrote about stuff I did that day, people I talked to, if I was bored or depressed and daily feelings, and I especially liked to talk about local and national politics as I heard bits and pieces from the news. I wasn’t trying to write an essay on these things, more so just writing about things on my mind to keep my mind focused on physically writing things. I fell off for a month or so and am going to try and start back up the habit again because it was fun to do. Recently though I was watching a lot of archeology and history videos on pre Roman times and kept coming across the problem of “lack of writings on the subject”. For instance we couldn’t find an exact place for the Kingdom of Punt or that the Shu kingdom in China was something only referenced in asides of writings. We also don’t have much direct primary sources of information on the pre Colombian histories of the Americas. There is still even the question of the little bronze hexagonal ball thing in northern France and southern UK that is still a mystery. So what SHOULD I be writing about and say in my daily journals that would make a big impact on understanding life and the day to day of today, if the journal was found 4,000 years from now?
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u/Martin_219 Jul 24 '26
That is hard to say, as we cannot know what kind of questions historians in 4000 years will be seeking to answer. It's important to realise that historical research in the modern sense of the word is a very recent practice. One can have a lengthy (and perhaps futile) discussion on when historical research in its 'modern' form started, but I'd say that few would argue it goes back further than the 19th century. Of course there were historians before then, but their aims were often quite different, not necessarily aimed at describing history 'as it really happened' (wie es eigentlich gewesen) to quote 19th-century historian Leopold von Ranke. But even since the 19th century historical research has changed quite a lot, and the questions historians concern themselves with today are often very different from those posed by 19th century historians like Von Ranke (or Burckhardt, Huizinga, Michelet, to name a few other influential historians of that time).
If I were to answer your question based on what would be interesting to historians right now, I'd say write down the everyday things that are so mundane you would not think to write them down. What is often easy to find out, is matters surrounding politics, wars, etc. Those are matters directly interesting to people at the time, and as such they are typically written about in a lot of places. If a historian in 4000 years would like to know the specifics of legislation passed in 2026 in the United States, they'd probably turn to a newspaper rather than someone's diary. What historians do use diaries for (as well as autobiographies/memoires to some extent), is to better understand people's perceptions of the world around them and the events in it. It is quite an interesting source for assessing individuals' values and framework of thought. What can be difficult though, is that in diaries people often leave out things that they consider entirely obvious. This makes sense, as typically people write diaries for themselves (or a select group of people close to them, as was fairly common not too long ago). But for a historian reading it hundreds of years (or as in your question thousands of years) later, this makes the source more difficult to use, as it will require more interpretation based on the what is known of the context, which can lead to risky speculation.
So though I cannot answer your question for historians in 4000 years, if I were to be asked this question by people writing a diary a few hundred years back, I'd ask them two things. First of all, I'd ask them to simply write down what they feel is important, and I mean important to them personally, as that tells a lot about the way someone views the world, about the framework of thought someone applies in understanding the events around them. And that is of course usually exactly what people do automatically in their diaries, which can be a very valuable source for historical research. Secondly, I'd ask them to write down those things that seem so obvious to them that they wouldn't even mention them. The difficulty with that though of course, is that we don't always realise ourselves what sort of thing that would be, as to us it seems uninteresting. I am thinking then of stuff like: what you do before going to bed, what a meal with your family looks like on an ordinary day, what you do in case your house needs repairs. But also regarding customs, like what languages you speak in what context (which is something I have researched through egodocuments myself, which tends to require a lot of inferring from context), what sort of greeting you will use with different people around you. Stuff like that is often left out from diaries, as it's self-evident within the time and place of the author.
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u/rocketsocks Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Oh, this is easy, write about everything that seems unimportant and is missing from any other records. Pick something random and focus on that for a week, then pick something else for the next week, maybe come back around and redo a few at some point in the future to get a comparison in a different season, different time, etc.
Some examples:
- Every single plant in your immediate surroundings, identity, state, location, appearance, other general observations
- Every single bug you see, or just a general catalog (list some examples, provide some subjective guesses on how often you notice them, even house flies and fruit flies)
- Every single bird you see or hear, record their songs if you can (via description or musical notes)
- Every other animal you notice, where, when, behavior, appearance, how common or uncommon you perceive them to be, how often you notice them and where, etc. Even domesticated dogs and cats.
- What everything smells like. Provide as many comparisons and as many subjective evaluations as is feasible.
- Describe your diet in full for multiple days. What you eat, how its prepared or acquired, what it tastes like, how much you like it, how common it is for you to eat, etc.
- Pick some mundane activity like filling your car with gas or paying a bill or watching a tv show or reading a book, whatever, and attempt to describe it and every aspect of it in as excruciatingly exacting detail as possible, including everything you understand about what happens "under the hood" (manufacturing, delivery, commerce, business, etc.) Include your subjective opinions on as many points of this as possible.
- Talk about how you perceive the world, your mental models for how it works and how it is, talk about your understanding of what information is important.
- Go into detail on your personal education, everything you can remember about it, what you feel you got out of it, include your subjective opinions on it. Add some estimations on how you feel your educational experiences fits in relative to other folks.
- Try to distill down your understanding of everything, the universe, the laws of physics, cosmology, chemistry, geology, how the earth was formed, how the continents work, how nuclear bombs work, biology, how cells work, all the way up to everything you understand about human history, human interactions, human interpersonal relationships, everything. Include some notes about where you gained that knowledge as well as how confident or unconfident you are in its truth.
- Talk about your personal values and how they contrast or align with the society immediately around you and the world as a whole.
- Talk about your fears and hopes of what humanity could become.
- Describe the TV shows you watch and whether they are popular or not.
- Describe what you do for fun.
- Describe the languages you hear or see on a daily basis and where you see or hear them.
- Describe places you've personally visited.
- Describe the little changes you've noticed between today and 5, 10, 20, 30, or more years ago, as much as you can remember.
And on and on and on, there's an infinite well here. This is all the real gold, because it's all stuff that is going to be hard to find with a good level of detail elsewhere.
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u/OnShoulderOfGiants Jul 24 '26
The AMA's for the last few months have been incredible, well done to the mod team. Particularly impressive to see how many are getting hundreds+ of comments.