I’m Robyn Metcalfe, a food historian and futurist, with a concentration in the history of urban food markets, particularly in Western Europe during the 19th century. I’ve written and spoken about everything from London’s 19th-century meat markets to the evolution of American livestock breeding practices, to the deceptive simplicity of the peanut butter sandwich. I’m also director of Food City, a nonprofit organization that explores the way technology shapes our relationship with food, and the author of Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics, in which I explore an often-overlooked aspect of the global food system: how food moves from producer to consumer.
Why, you may be asking, does a historian think about the future of food? Because it's all about context — having the knowledge about how we got here as we think about the future. I’m here from 12 – 2 pm EDT to field any and all questions about the past and future of our food system and how technology is reshaping our relationship to food.
Proof: https://i.redd.it/g0z6axhd6q931.jpg
Edit: Thanks for your thoughtful questions, everyone. I’m signing off for now, but may hop back on later to see if I can answer a few more. This was great fun.....
Title mainly. As I mentioned, I've noticed some trends between the two countries, I assume due to the proximity of the two nations and their relative power. It also seems that this entanglement lasted literally centuries, perhaps from 1000 all the way until the 1800s or so.
Examples of things I've noticed are the marriages between the two countries' leaders that took place, especially early on. Certain positional territories have confused me as well, such as Normandy. From what I understand, Normandy was for much of its history ruled by English kings, and in one instance I heard that a French king demanded that an English king bend the knee as a vassal of the French king due to Normandy still sort of being under French dominion (even though it was ruled by an english king???). As I said, this history is extraordinarily deep and confusing, and any links to relevant reading would be much appreciated.
Did most people spend most of human history just being peasants, working long hours on the farm, growing whatever staple crops were important to that region? Was everyone just sort of uniformly miserable?
All the history books talk about big dramatic events (wars, plagues etc.) and unique people (kings, writers, military commanders etc.). It occurs to me that most people were commoners and most of the time they weren't in the middle of some unusual situation. Are there any good resources on what life was like for these people, and how they felt about their lot?
When lighthouses were widely used as a means of navigation, was their use in other places around the world as extensive as the Atlantic coast of the US? The only lighthouse from history I can think of outside of the east coast is the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria.
Did France economy in second part of 20th century benefited greatly from its ex-colonies?
If both Austrian and Turkish empires were defeated in World War I, why is Austria much richer than Turkey today?
I'm Professor Eleanor Dickey from Classics at the University of Reading in the UK and my new book about Latin translations and textbooks has just been published.
This gives us lots of insights into how Romans actually lived their lives, because the textbooks for learning Latin include sample conversations about shopping in the market, lounging at the baths, and arguing with drunken relatives.
I'll be answering questions from 3pm GMT / 10am EST and will hope to be here for at least two hours.
Proof: This is me, running a Roman-style classroom to show my students how children of the Empire would have learned.
Department of Classics on Twitter: @UniRdg_Classics
Thanks very much everyone but I need to see a student now. I’ll be back online to answer more questions in 3 hours, at 8pm GMT / 3pm EST / 12pm PST
I am now back online ready to answer more questions.
Good night, everyone! I need to log off now, but thank you all for your excellent questions.
History is complicated.
That's not the central thesis of Peter H. Wilson's Europe's Tragedy, or at least not what he would say it was, but it might be the biggest theme you come away from it with.
If you're not German, you probably do not know much about the Thirty Years War. You might vaguely recall it was a religious conflict, or that it resulted in the Peace of Westphalia which is important in international relations for some reason, or if you really remember high school history you might even be able to mispronounce "Cuius regio, eius religio." You could repeat a joke you saw on /r/historymemes about how the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” It was a war that was enormously destructive; some 8 million people died, and millions more were displaced. With a German death toll similar to that of World War II but among a much smaller population, it is the defining national tragedy for Germans, with around 25% of the population of the territories comprising modern Germany dying over the course of the conflict.
One of the tricky things that bedevil the social sciences in pop culture is that a little knowledge about a topic can often be worse than no knowledge at all. Humans and the societies they build are mind-bogglingly complex; surface-level understandings are inherently reductive. OK, that’s by necessity. But then you throw in human tendencies to pattern-match, or frame things through their own ideological lens, or replace a foreign context with their own, and things get warped even further.
This isn’t just a problem with laymen: Wilson himself notes that much of the history of the 30 Years War was written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an age of nationalism and centralized nation-states, in which a multi-ethnic/linguistic/confessional entity that looked to have been vomited onto a map of Central Europe seemed hopelessly obsolete to historians. German historians in particular blamed the Holy Roman Empire for all the then-current ills of Germany at the time of writing.
The great success of this book is the way it unravels the overarching narratives and simplifications of popular memory of the 30 Years War. Principally this is done through very liberal doses of context; the book takes up more than a quarter of its massive length in addressing both its causes (while stressing its non-inevitability), as well as investing time in the periphery (if you would like to know more about the metallurgy and export
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