A bit of good history – the man who watered the milk, and how the court dealt with it in 1822.

But that seems a nice way to introduce a call for submissions, for the Carnival of Bad History, which will be here on November 21. So what’s the Carnival? Going to the source, what’s included are:

* Bad presentations of history – This is the easy one. Review bad historical movies, books and teevee. How anachronistic are those uniforms? How improbable is that alternate history novel? Did kindly frontier doctors really talk like that?
* Bad uses of history – When pundits, politicians, and talking heads get hold of history they often twist it beyond all recognition or justification. Tell us about the mangaled metaphors, unjustified parallels, or outright lies you find in the public sphere.
* Historians behaving badly – Historians manage their share of embarassing talking head appearances, plagiarism scandals, and corporate sell-outs. We don’t want mere unpleasant gossip. Contributions in this category should be of historians behaving badly in their professional capacity as historians.

Should be fun! So send in your posts like that – or take this as an invitation to really vent your spleen, then pass on the link. Please email natalieben AT gmail DOT com.

You’ve got to have some sort of British institutional access, but it surely couldn’t be too hard to talk your way into your local further education library: The House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1800 – 1901, comprising nearly 6,000 volumes and over 4 million pages are being made available to further and higher education institutions.

Lots of new goodies have been added to the RHS Bibliography, including several thousand new items on the London-specific search.

And that reminds me I forgot to point to the most recent History Carnival, on Holocaust Controversies.

Over on Comment is Free I’ve a piece about the power of cultural mixing. It refers to the Polynesian exhibition at the British Museum, which I’ve more formally reviewed elsewhere.