Investigations of a Dog

If you know about science, please could you help me with this curious little conundrum. In an article I’m writing I need to appeal to the authority of Newton’s laws of motion, but how do I cite them? Is there a standard science book which everyone uses and which lays out the basic laws of physics? Am I supposed to cite Newton himself? If so what is the standard edition? I know I shouldn’t have to prove something so basic and generally accepted, but the historians I’m arguing against have blatantly ignored the third law of motion and imagined something which is physically impossible!

It didn’t take long before I decided to start a Zotero group. It’s called War and Gender and is dedicated to collecting and sharing any material relating to the intersections of these two very important things. There are no limits on period or place, membership is open, and all members can add to the group library. So if you’re interested, and if you’re using Zotero 2.0, get stuck in.

You can see from my profile that the groups I’m involved with so far are all quite specific and tend towards things that relatively little has been written about yet. I think we’re all still finding our way and sticking to things that are likely to be manageable. In the future it’ll be interesting to see if more general groups appear and whether they work out. I could start a British Civil Wars group, but it would be potentially huge. I already have over 900 items in my library tagged with “english civil war”, and these are mostly biased towards my research interests in England 1642-46. I don’t have very much on Scotland, Ireland, the Second Civil War, the Commonwealth or the Protectorate. Maybe more specialist sub-fields will be the way to go, but we’ll see eventually.

Ian MacInnes has set up a Zotero group for The horse in history and culture where we can pool references to horses. This was the incentive I needed to finally sort out my collections and upgrade to Zotero 2.0. I’ve set up my profile on the Zotero website, added a CV and shared my library so anyone can browse it. Although it looks like I’ve got an awful lot of collections, I’ve simplified the hierarchy and started making better use of tags. I’m not sharing notes at the moment, but maybe I will later. (NB: if you uncheck the “share notes” box in the privacy settings it only hides notes that are attached to items, not standalone notes.) There’s also another group for early-modern animal studies where you can find stuff about other species as well as horses. Now I’m wondering what other groups would be useful, but I’m not sure if I want the responsibility of owning a group yet.

Historiann has posted about a very Whiggish article in the New York Times about how changes in warfare have supposedly improved women’s rights by creating more opportunities for female combat soldiers. As Ann points out, there are lots of things wrong with this article. She concentrates on the fact that similar things were said during the Gulf War in 1991 but that the supposed progress evaporated after the war. As some of the commenters suggest, the idea that women used to be incapable of fighting but that changing technology has made things easier it possible for them is basically a lie. Joshua Goldstein’s book War and Gender (which I’ve posted about before) presented lots of empirical evidence to demolish the assumption that women are smaller and weaker than men. This is true on average, but in practice most people aren’t exactly average. In fact statistics for size and strength for men and women are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The biggest, strongest women are bigger and stronger than the smallest, weakest men. Goldstein estimated that in a major war, if combat soldiers were recruited purely by ability and not by gender then about 10-15% of combat soldiers should be female. This has clearly not been the case in reality. Goldstein found that some form of war exists in almost every culture, and that women have nearly always been formally excluded from active combat roles. There are a few exceptions (eg the Dahomey in West Africa in the 19th century, the Soviet Union in the Second World War) but these just prove that women can fight, and therefore their exclusion in most other cultures must be down to gender ideology. Or not quite. Because Goldstein sees the gendering of combat roles as being too universal to be down to gender ideology, which would be expected to be culturally specific. This is where I part company with Goldstein. While War and Gender is a really important book which needs to be read by anyone interested in either war or gender (or just by anyone), it has its limitations, which we need to move on from. (more…)

On YouTube you can watch a fantastic video of Lucy Worsley doing Henry VIII’s weekly shopping, followed by a virtual autopsy to show what all that food did to his body. I don’t buy the diabetes diagnosis though. It was obviously his humours getting out of balance. Can we have Lucy shopping for William Cavendish and his horses next?

[Edit: but there's a FedEx arrow. Go and read Innerbrat's critique of L'Oreal's pseudo science then see if you can spot it.]

[cross-posted at The horse in history and culture]

When I started my comeback as a historian in 2006, after a 5 year career break, I wanted to push myself in new directions. Therefore I challenged myself to come up with the most way-out research question possible. What I came up with was: do people construct gender for horses? I decided to look specifically at the roles of horses in war, partly because I’m a military historian, and partly because war is one of the most heavily gendered things in history. I first wrote a blog post about the project in October 2006, but since then I’ve changed my mind about lots of things. I followed up with two posts about how cavalry drill books specified criteria for good war horses. While the books I looked at didn’t always explicitly say that stallions were always best, there was a definite male bias, and mares were never mentioned. This post is a look at where I’ve got to now, and where I need to go next. (more…)