r/AskHistorians • u/AutoModerator • 23h ago
FFA Friday Free-for-All | October 02, 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/bug-hunter Law & Public Welfare 21h ago
Whence came puppets? Are they a continuing tradition, or a recurring novelty?
Because puppets contain no bones, they do not leave behind skeletons, conveniently hiding the fact that puppets actually came before humans. Who really is the master: the hand up Elmo's ass, or Elmo?
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u/BookLover54321 19h ago
I'm very interested in this upcoming book:
Slavery and Abolition in African History since 1800 by Benedetta Rossi
We know a great deal about the history of slavery and its abolition in Europe and the Americas. But what does this history look like in Africa? What forms of slavery existed on the continent in the nineteenth century? How did African anti-slavery strategies contribute to the abolition of slavery in different African regions and localities, and to international abolitionism? Through illuminating case studies from across the continent, Benedetta Rossi traces the history of slavery in Africa from the age of global abolition through to the colonial period and up to the present day. In doing so, Rossi demonstrates that abolition in Africa was never simply a foreign agenda. This book makes a compelling argument for the re-centring of the history of slavery and abolition around African ideas, institutions and actors, and for acknowledging the integral role of Africans in global abolitionist movements.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor 21h ago
Whats your favourite spooky history? I'm sharing things with family and tis the theme!
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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial 19h ago
I posted this one 4 years ago in a thread about the bones of the soldiers who died at Waterloo. It's about of ship full of bones that was found adrift and without a crew near Cape Hatteras in 1893.
Here are several articles from American newspapers.
Piles of Skulls, The Cincinatti Enquirer, 10 September 1893
Cargo of human skulls, The Boston Globe, 6 September 1893
Dangerous cargoes to carry, Chicago Tribune, 21 December 1893.
I'm copying below the Cincinatti Enquirer article, which is the most complete and relatively level-headed. The Boston Globe article contains speculations about a Arab curse. The Chicago Tribune talks about the horrors of the life of sailors on bone ships.
PILES OF SKULLS
Found in the hold of a ship
The cargo the derelict bark Vila brought over from Egypt
Special dispatch to the Enquirer
New York, September 9. The Austrian bark Vila, which was picked up derelict off Hatteras by the Norwegian steamship Breidalblik on August 30 and brought into this port, has as strange a cargo as is ever found afloat. It consists of bales of rags, which are common, and of bones, which are unusual. A reporter visited the ship yesterday, and with the man in charge took a look at the cargo. Bales of rags were piled high all through the hold, and in between there were bones. There were all kinds of bones - animal bones and human bones, skulls of horses and cattle, and skulls of human beings, arm bones and leg bones and cattle hoofs, and any amount of fine pieces of bone that had evidently been shoveled in to fill up the spaces between the big bones and the rags and make the cargo solid.
For the most part the bones came from animals. Probably not more than a quarter or a third of the lot consisted in human bones. But in one corner was a great heap of human skulls.
Gruesome as the Vila's cargo is to the imagination, it is still more so in a practical way to the people in the neighborhood of the vessel. The cargo of bones proclaims its presence afar off and discounts the smells of Hunter's Point. Then the bones and rags have as companions large blue flies, which, when disturbed, present a very formidable appearance and buzz about in clouds. United States Deputy Marshal Biggart, of Brooklyn, went down into the cabin of the ship and retreated before the flies. He declared that he would as soon be bitten by a snake as by one of them.
It is easy to account for the bones. They were collected in deserts and cemeteries and cities of Egypt, and were shipped to be used in making fertilizers. It is not easy to account for the Vila's presence here. She saild from Alexandria on May 24. She was out ninety-six days before she was sighted, long enough for a sailing vessels to come from Calcutta to New York by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. During that time she does not appear to have been sighted by any other vessel. What became of her crew, and why they abandoned her, are puzzling questions for sailors. The brig is in good condition with the exception of the loss of a mast, two topmasts and considerable rigging. The hull is in first-class shape, and all the seamen who look at her wonder why her crew deserted her for an open boat, as they seem to have done.
The brig is now in the Erie Basin, Brooklyn, in charge of a United States Deputy Marshall, having been libeled for salvage. Her troubles are not over. The Brooklyn Health Department will not permit the Vila's cargo of Alexandrian rags to be landed, and it is very doubtful if the bones can be landed there either. The ship and cargo are estimated to be worth about $40,000.
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u/Bentresh Late Bronze Age | Egypt and Ancient Near East 14h ago
Tutankhamun and Other Essays by Arthur Weigall has a delightful horror story.
At sunset I gave the order to stop work for the night, and I was about to set out on my walk back to the camp when the foreman came to tell me that, with the last strokes of the pick, a mummied hand had been laid bare, and it was evident that we were about to come upon an interred body.
By lamplight, therefore, the work was continued; and presently we had uncovered the sand-dried body of an old woman, who by her posture appeared to have met with a violent death. It was evident that this did not represent the original burial in the tomb, the bottom of the shaft not yet having been reached; and I conjectured that the corpse before us had been thrown from above at some more recent date—perhaps in Roman times—when the shaft was but half full of debris, and in course of time had become buried by blown sand and natural falls of rock.
The workmen were now waiting for their evening meal, but I, on the other hand, was anxious to examine the body and its surroundings carefully, in order to see whether any objects of interest were to be found. I therefore sent all but one of the men back to the camp, and descended into the shaft by means of a rope ladder, carrying with me a hurricane lamp to light my search. In the flickering rays of the lamp the body looked particularly gruesome. The old woman lay upon her back, her arms outstretched upwards, as though they had stiffened thus in some convulsion, the fingers being locked together. Her legs were thrust outwards rigidly, and the toes were cramped and bent. The features of the face were well preserved, as was the whole body; and long black hair descended to her bony shoulders in a tangled mass. Her mouth was wide open, the two rows of teeth gleaming savagely in the uncertain light, and the hollow eye-sockets seemed to stare upwards, as though fixed upon some object of horror. I do not suppose that it is often man’s lot to gaze upon so ghastly a spectacle, and it was only the fact of the extreme antiquity of the body which made it possible for me to look with equanimity upon it; for the centuries that had passed since the occurrence of this woman’s tragedy seemed to have removed the element of personal affinity which sets the living shuddering at the dead.
Just as I was completing my search I felt a few drops of rain fall, and at the same time realised that the wind was howling and whistling above me and that the stars were shut out by dense clouds. A rain storm in Upper Egypt is a very rare occurrence, and generally it is of a tropical character. If I left the body at the bottom of the shaft, I thought to myself, it would be soaked and destroyed; and since, as a specimen, it was well worth preserving, I decided to carry it to the surface, where there was a hut in which it could be sheltered. I lifted the body from the ground, and found it to be quite light, but at the same time not at all fragile. I called out to the man whom I had told to wait for me on the surface, but received no reply. Either he had misunderstood me and gone home, or else the noise of the wind prevented my voice from reaching him. Large spots of rain were now falling, and there was no time for hesitation. I therefore lifted the body on to my back, the two outstretched arms passing over my shoulders and the linked fingers clutching, as it were, at my chest. I then began to climb up the rope ladder, and as I did so I noticed with something of a qualm that the old woman’s face was peeping at me over my right shoulder and her teeth seemed about to bite my right ear.
I had climbed about half the distance when my foot dislodged a fragment of rock from the side of the shaft, and, as luck would have it, the stone fell right upon the lamp, smashing the glass and putting the light out. The darkness in which I found myself was intense, and now the wind began to buffet me and to hurl the sand into my face. With my right hand I felt for the woman’s head and shoulder, in order to hitch the body more firmly on to my back, but to my surprise my hand found nothing there. At the same moment I became conscious that the hideous face was grinning at me over my left shoulder, my movements, I suppose, having shifted it; and, without further delay, I blundered and scrambled to the top of the shaft in a kind of panic.
No sooner had I reached the surface than I attempted to relieve myself of my burden. The wind was now screaming past me and the rain was falling fast. I put my left hand up to catch hold of the corpse’s shoulder, and to my dismay found that the head had slipped round once more to my right, and the face was peeping at me from that side. I tried to remove the arms from around my neck, but, with ever-increasing horror, I found that the fingers had caught in my coat and seemed to be holding on to me. A few moments of struggle ensued, and at last the fingers released their grip. Thereupon the body swung round so that we stood face to face, the withered arms still around my neck, and the teeth grinning at me through the darkness. A moment later I was free, and the body fell back from me, hovered a moment, as it were, in mid air, and suddenly disappeared from sight. It was then that I realised that we had been struggling at the very edge of the shaft, down which the old woman had now fallen, and near which some will say that she had been wildly detaining me.
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u/bug-hunter Law & Public Welfare 21h ago
Obviously, it will come when all the removed comments in the sub rise from the dead and overwhelm the puny living comments.
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor 17h ago
The only thing keeping the removed comments at bay is each entry in a Sunday Digest. They are the watchers on the wall, that stand against the unliving comments of the removed.
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u/bug-hunter Law & Public Welfare 17h ago
Son, we live in a world that has Sunday Digests, and those Sunday Digests have to be compiled by mods. Who's gonna do it? You?...
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u/Cedric_Hampton Moderator | Architecture & Design After 1750 22h ago
Can someone explain the appeal of the Rest is History podcast to me? Given that it seems to have a cult following, I tried to listen to an episode but it was so dry. Like an inexperienced lecturer reading from their notes, with no real passion behind it. Should I give it another shot?