#if the byzantines were so roman why did they suck so much

[elbiotipo]

I'm so tired of the Middle Ages addiction in strategy gaming, I've done several posts about it but I'm still mad that Europa Universalis 5 has thrown back its starting date to fucking 1337, virtually the Middle Ages, all to appease the Byzantium fanbase. It's a game supposed to be about the Rennaissance and Early Modernity! It's about global trade, colonialism, religious conflicts, the rise of capitalism and liberalism, all incredibly interesting things to explore, and not only that, a game with a global perspective that can let you play American, Asian, African cultures that don't get as much interest in popular history.

But no, we gotta make the byzaboos who want to live out the Byzantium, oh sorry, Eastern Roman Empire (because they were ROMANS didn't you know they were ROMANS) fantasy happy instead of exploring all those historical dynamics. NO SOUTH AMERICAN PATCH FOR YOU, WE GOTTA GIVE CONSTANTINOPLE MORE WONDERS!

[realtalk-princeton]

winnie P, why did you choose to be a history major over slavic/something more specific?

Response from Winnie P:

Haha I’m gonna give this a long response cuz I still have started zero (0!!!!!!!!!) of my dean’s date papers! Woo!!!

I think something really important in deciding on your major is what type of methodology/independent work you’re interested in.

Honestly this made me consider Slavic, because one of Slavic’s independent works is a translation project, which I really like.

However, I think literary criticism (the other type of independent work) is not my cup of tea. I prefer just reading things, honestly. I took a class in Slavic on Tolstoy my frosh spring, and while I got a good grade, I felt like the kind of analysis I was asked to do was kind of bs-y (my work at least, obviously I’m not trying to trashtalk anyone’s major, so please no one get offended as I proceed to trashtalk my experiences in your major). Also, I really dislike a few of the main teachers in the Slavic department, and I would have had to take more classes with them, so that would have sucked (especially since I have genuinely bad relationships with two of them).

But then again, when choosing a major, you have to think about the coursework you want to take.

In terms of more specific majors, there was nothing else I was considering. I think my interests are actually fairly broad, not that specific. I’m a total slavaboo, I really like the history of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, etc., and early Russia (like Muscovy and Kievan Rus) are also super interesting to me, though the empire itself is a little less so, except in particular, short time periods or particular themes. WWII from the Russian perspective is the greatest war of all time, and amazingly well-documented, God bless. So, you’d think, I should study Slavic!

BUT I love French history too. I think the French Revolution was one of the most romantic times in history, Napoleon was objectively the protagonist of all history, the Third Republic has some incredibly fun times (especially with regards to Empire nostalgia), WWI from the French side is the most enthralling (and heartbreaking) war the West has ever had. I also love Rome: Marc Antony might be the first historical personage I fell in love with, Caesar did nothing wrong except love too much, the Senate were the real tyrants, the Gracchi did nothing wrong (unless perfection is a flaw), Cicero deserved worse, etc. I also love the Byzantines (who were really Romans) because their aesthetics are top tier, and I will never forgive Venice for ruining everything good in my life. And US history is literally the history of the greatest country ever kicking butt and taking names, so studying it is hilariously fun. Anyway, the moral of the story is that I’m overly passionate about a lot of different time periods in history, so I love studying lots of different things, and I ultimately think a major like Slavic or French would have been too narrow for me to get to study everything I enjoyed.

If I already wanted to take classes in all these things, the only real major that facilitates that is history.

The main thing I was debating was actually history versus something like politics, but I realized I don’t really like the methodology of politics courses/independent work. I think that the lenses and goals used in studying history from political, woody woo and history perspectives are all really different, and that you really have to take classes in the different fields to see which one you agree more with, or find more interesting.

Honestly, whenever I write a pol paper I feel as though I am just bs-ing, and cherry-picking historical truths to fit a ridiculously overbroad narrative, kind of the way I imagine pollsters work – and I have always felt like this is what I am supposed to be doing in pol classes, and it has always gotten me good grades. Obviously, you could argue this style gives you more “meaningful” results than a 35 page history paper where you discuss the usage of the word “nationality” versus “nation” in one particular guy’s newspaper articles over a three year period (basically my spring JP). But one of the two is particularly more interesting to me, because I am not super interested in “practical” applications of the historical periods I’m interested in, which I feel like always end up misrepresenting them. If I were a pol major writing my JP on the same thing I wrote my spring JP on, I think it would have ended up turning into an analysis of newspaper sales and some argument about the formation of communist people’s movements, in order to give it some real-world “bite,” (this argument is completely possible from my source, I just think it would be lazy and unacceptable in a history class, but acceptable in a politics class if you were trying to illustrate some political theory or paradigm) instead of some chill, completely theoretical intellectual history.

And Woody Woo was nixed because of the task force type independent work. I wanted to do my independent work on my own not with others.