u/dhowlett1692

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1safr37/creating_an_informed_citizenry_in_the_early/

>Hello, everyone! I'm George Oberle a Librarian and Associate Prof. of History at George Mason University where I teach Historical Methods and American history. I'm here to talk about my book, Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic (UVA Press). This book explores the impact of the early American "info wars," that emerged from debates between the founders over what kinds of institutions should be formed to educate the electorate and where intellectual authority should reside in a republic. Central to these discussions was the question of a national university championed by George Washington and others, which sparked a decades-long battle culminating in the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution.

>Here's the overview from my publisher's website:

>When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning, George Oberle provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge was created, circulated, and consumed in the early American republic.

>Many of the founders, including George Washington, initially favored the creation of a centralized national university to educate Americans from all backgrounds. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, politicians moved away from any notion of publicly educated laypeople generating useful knowledge. The federal government ultimately founded the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to be run by experts only. Oberle’s insightful analysis of the competing ideas over the nature of education offers food for thought as we continue to grapple with a rapidly evolving media landscape amid contested meanings of knowledge, expertise, and the obligations of citizenship.

>Please ask me anything about the book.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s7ptb7/i_am_dr_josephine_hoegaerts_here_to_talk_about/

>Hello r/AskHistorians, my name is Josephine Hoegaerts. I’m a professor of European Culture at the University of Amsterdam, and I have always been very interested in sound and people’s voices. (Being a life-long choir girl probably has something to do with this obsession). Why do we like some voices, and not others? How can we listen for hours to one beloved teacher or inspiring politician, but immediately switch off when another opens their mouth? And have we always sounded the way we do now?

>The last question was the one that, as a historian, fascinated me most, so about ten years ago I set out to study how people used their vocal apparatus in the past, how physicians and scientists started studying vocal health, what journalists and critics thought of the vocal performances they heard, and especially what people did when they thought there was something wrong with their voice. How did they treat hoarseness? How did they learn to sing higher, speak louder, or talk fluently?

>I learned a lot about the aspirations of speakers and singers, about the strict norms that ruled speech and conversation, and perhaps most of all about how people with speech impediments were treated by doctors, but also by society. (I recently published a book on these topics: Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting – Penn Press If you're interested in the book, feel free to use discount code PENN-JHOEGAERTS30)

>Spoiler alert: I never found out what people ‘really’ sounded like in the past, but I discovered many more interesting things in the process – including a wild range of sore throat remedies you should probably never try.

>I’ll be here from 11 am to 3 pm ET to answer all your questions about voices of the past, speech, speech impediments and sound history.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s5384i/i_am_olivia_weisser_a_historian_of_medicine_and/

>Hi r/AskHistorians! My name is Olivia Weisser and I am a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. I work on the history of medicine, health and healing, sexually transmitted diseases, illness, gender, and the lived experiences of patients in the early modern period (1500-1800). I recently published a book on what it was like to live with venereal disease in London in the 1600s and 1700s called The Dreaded Pox. Ask me anything!

Have any questions about the history of Indians in Zimbabwe? Ask me anything about migration, race, and colonialism in Southern Africa!

>Hi everyone! I’m Trishula Patel, an assistant professor of African and South Asian history at the University of Denver. My book, Becoming Zimbabwean: A History of Indians in Rhodesia (University of Virginia Press, 2026), is the first comprehensive history of Indians in Zimbabwe from 1890 to 1980. A Zimbabwean of Indian origin myself, I center the stories of individuals and families, framing them within the context of extensive archival research. Indians initially played a critical part in the settler colonial process in Southern Rhodesia, but as new generations were born and raised, their politics and social lives evolved to localized forms of citizenship. Eventually, they functioned as part of the resistance to the Rhodesian white minority government, either through participation in the system as nonwhites or by joining the Black anticolonial nationalist movement. They did all this through their shops, African-rooted institutions that became social, economic, and political spaces through which Indians became Zimbabwean. I argue that the history of Indians in Zimbabwe is not that of a transient diaspora but that of an African community.

>Ask me anything about the book, or about the history of race, colonialism, and migration in Southern Africa! If you’d like to know more, you can use discount code 10VABOOKS for a limited time to buy the book here.

>Are you interested in Caribbean spirit demons and how they manifest in everyday life? I have written a new book about this subject: Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian Dominican Borderlands which seeks to explain why only the animals brought by Columbus have become spirt demons.

>In Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2025) Lauren Derby explores storytelling traditions among the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shape-shifting spirit demons called baka/bacá. Drawing on interviews with and life stories of residents in a central Haitian-Dominican frontier town, Derby contends that bacás—hot spirits from the sorcery side of vodou/vodú that present as animals and generate wealth for their owners—manifest what Dominicans call the fukú de Colón, the curse of Columbus. The dogs, pigs, cattle, and horses that Columbus brought with him are the only types of animals that bacás become. As instruments of Indigenous dispossession, these animals and their spirit demons convey a history of trauma and racialization in Dominican popular culture. In the context of slavery and beyond, bacás keep alive the promise of freedom, since shape-shifting has long enabled fugitivity. As Derby demonstrates, bacás represent a complex history of race, religion, repression, and resistance. Here is a link to the book for purchase and the free ebook: https://www.dukeupress.edu/betes-noires