The Historians' History of the World Puns

Hello everyone! I am Dr Megan Hunt, Teaching Fellow in American History at the University of Edinburgh. My interests are in the African American civil rights movement, and the American South more generally, as presented in educational materials and popular culture - particularly Hollywood film. I have written on films such as Selma, The Help, Mississippi Burning, and To Kill a Mockingbird, and am currently working on a book about civil rights, race, and religion in Hollywood cinema. I have also explored how civil rights is taught in the US and the UK, and the significance of educational standards to public memory of social activism. I am happy to answer questions on the movement itself or its representation in cinema/television and schools. I will be back to answer questions at 3pm GMT.

EDIT: Thank you so much for all of your questions! And I am very sorry that I have not been able to answer them all during the AMA.

Some people claim studying history is useless for a career, but for me, in high school, it's given me a basic grounding in analysis and research (this was GCSE History) but let's not get into that discussion. This is more about history itself.

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I've been doing some amateur research into underworld criminal organizations and how they tie into imperialism, and surprisingly (or not surprisingly) it's pretty extensive. Not only have the CIA and other Western intelligence groups used criminal organizations to hamper Anti-Imperialist or Marxist nations but many were effective.

I've seen more progressive and left liberals document this history, but not Marxists. Parenti the only one coming close. Why?

I started off by researching the underworld economy during the USSR. From what I've researched thus far, and there isn't much to begin with, is that it had extensive ties back to black market gangs in the West. What was kept at bay during the USSR exploded onto the scene and became dominant during the early days of the Russian Federation in the 90s. There is a direct link, these oligarchs and underworld figures didn't just appear out of nowhere. The underworld in the USSR was used by the West, before and after it's demise.

The explanations Soviet officials gave about hoarders, black marketeers, and such were seen as excuses in the West for the failures of central planning. In the research from Western scholars about the subject matter, they seem to all chide the Soviet system for not letting these "budding entrepreneurs" flourish. It's similar to what is going on in Venezuela.

The drug trade is also an entirely different ball game with an even bigger story.

But my point is, is this explored at all in the Marxist historical literature?

When giving bad news, business writers are encouraged to follow a specific template:

>The opening should have a buffer to minimize any damage to the relationship. Use a positive or neutral opening to maintain goodwill.

>The body should include reasons to help the reader see it from your point of view. You want to show that you are being both fair and reasonable. Be clear and firm about the bad news, but also be brief, positive, and low key about it.

>Closing should contain an appropriate gesture of goodwill, and perhaps a potential solution for the reader’s problem.

There is only one single paragraph, bested between testimony after testimony, that explains anything about the hat. The Church historian then explains that the hat was probably used to block out sunlight.

The majority of the article tries to mystify the entire experience by calling it a “work and a wonder” repeatedly.

Not to mention, the majority of the footnotes take you to other Ensign articles. There isn’t a TBM on earth who would go searching through multiple Ensign articles in order to find the original source.

This question is motivated by the fact that I am reading a portion of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and I read up a bit on Gibbon too. However, I'm looking for general answers, not just in relation to this one work/author.

For example, the site of Troy was irreversibly damaged by Schliemann's excavations. Can't we say that it was better if the site had been discovered much later, perhaps denying us of the knowledge of the location of the city, but preserving it for modern archaeology?

Going back in time, when do modern experts start cringing when they learn that a site was excavated in a certain decade?

This thought has been in the back of my mind for quite a while due to the fact that throughout my time learning about history, I learned that things were not always what they seemed to be or were not how I was taught long ago like how Columbus never actually set foot on American soil and his reverence as an American hero came much later after the foundation of America as a nation (and it was done by Italian immigrants, not Americans), or how the stories of Nero during the great fire of Rome were probably exaggerated and sensationalist remarks of the tyrant that he was during that time to picture him in a bad image, or how I learned that the Greco-Persian war and the Peloponnesian War were not that black and white as I was told before, or how I once taught that the Roman Enpire actually ended after the fall of Rome during the 4th Century but actually still existed as the Byzantine Empire (at least the historians call it that because the Byzantines still called themselves Romans) till the 15th Century.

All of these were either the results of misinformation (whether intentional or not; possible bias or perhaps propaganda (like Herodotus, the father of history, is also known as the father of lies (at least, that was what he was known for at a time) becuase at was later found in the Histories, some connotations were either false or make-believe); or where some facts or evidence were re-arranged in a manner that people viewed as what was fit for them or how they saw it (like The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon where he glorified the legacies and the actions that the Western Roman Empire left behind that impacted Europe but completely neglected the Byzantine Empire); or where there are historical information that you find in plenty of books, articles and websites and are treated as fact or valid but later investigations or later insight of other perspectives of a certain event with say otherwise (like for example, there is a online comic that depicts as Nikola Tesla as a greatest and misunderstood genius who ever lived. I even believed that too until I encountered a detailed article (I think it was on reddit as well, I cannot remember) that debunked the whole article and treated it as rhetoric. Or another example is when later investigations found that the pyramids were probably built by paid workers, not by slaves)

Sometimes perceptions of historical events have influenced other areas like works of art like the story of Nazi Germany and WW2